


Santalales

by Chandri



Series: Keystone [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Canonical Character Death, College Student Stiles, Derek Gets Therapy, Derek Hale is actually the best at feelings because he believes in self-improvement, F/M, Family, Family Secrets, Folklore, Gen, I ramble a lot about folklore and mythology and nobody can stop me, M/M, Magic, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Magnificent Aunt Pearl, Memory Loss, Mental Health Issues, Mentions of Cancer, Mythology - Freeform, Parent Death, Past Character Death, Past Torture, Past Underage Sex, Past Violence, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Build, Stiles is so tired, Stiles needs therapy, derek is an adult, everybody gets some help, he just needs 10000 naps, it is actually STILES who is bad at feelings, past dubious consent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-12
Updated: 2016-07-15
Packaged: 2018-07-23 14:57:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 53,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chandri/pseuds/Chandri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So he was a kid, and his mom died, and it took a long time, and he watched it happen, and he was never the same after. It sounds so mundane compared to the rest of his life, but loss is different for everyone and so very, very personal, or so he remembers his therapist saying when he was twelve. </p><p>Stiles has never processed fear or pain in a healthy way, and falling in with a werewolf pack and all associated violence and secrecy hasn’t really helped matters. But after the spell was broken, setting things right and pouring a lifetime of stolen memories back into his head, some part of him still expected things to settle down. To work themselves out.</p><p>As it turns out? Not so much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Moon

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously this story is canon-divergent at least from the end of season 2, mostly because I started the first story before partaking of the steaming pile of self-congratulatory garbage that was 3A. In this ‘verse, there is no Cora, and Boyd and Erica are alive. Peter is dead. Kate is super-dead. Some things have been taken from later seasons - for instance, Talia’s name - but I’ve cherry-picked, both for the sake of simplifying my life and because sometimes Teen Wolf is really, infuriatingly, excruciatingly poorly written.
> 
> This story begins several months after the conclusion of Golden Bough, and relies heavily on certain plot points from that story, so will make notably less sense if you haven’t read that one first. It covers a period between immediately before Thanksgiving to Midwinter a year later. 
> 
> Notes and warnings at the end and contain spoilers.

_ He’s in the woods, deep in the Preserve, though it’s not a spot he recognizes. The Preserve is huge, and a lowly human can’t keep it all in his head in perfect detail the way the wolves can; his own powers can only tell him that that’s where he is, that this is Pack land, their land. It knows him. _

_ This knowing is different, though; more tangible, more conscious, and he’s walking through close-crowded trees, the ground thick with underbrush, though he passes through with no trouble; like the forest is parting before him, though nothing really moves. Ahead, deeper under the trees where the shadows are dense, something is reaching for him. Calling to him. Something… _

_ The sudden light is blinding; the moon is directly overhead, full and fat and bright as midday sun. There’s a hole in the canopy above, a clearing as big as a parking lot stretching out before him. There’s a sense of absence, of something not-there, something that must have been… massive. _

_ And it’s something here, something under his feet, that’s reaching for him. Searching for him. _

_ Something big, and ancient, and like a beast finally rousing from an endless winter of hibernation, is rolling over with a rumble. _

_ Something is waking up. _

***

“We talked about this,” Stiles says, the first time he looks out his window to see Derek lurking at the foot of the tree outside his third-floor dorm room. “You can’t do this here, it’s a lot creepier.” It’s barely more than a whisper, because he knows Derek can hear him and there’s no point letting the other people on his floor get an early start on pegging him as the weird kid who talks to himself. “I’m coming down.”

On his way down the stairs, it occurs to him that it shouldn’t be weirder that his boyfriend - he has to pause for a second because he doesn’t even want to think the word “boyfriend” around Derek; he spooks easy - is visiting him on campus than it was for the same guy to climb in through his window when Stiles was in high school and Derek in his twenties.

And hey, look, more thoughts he should finish cycling through before Derek gets close enough to smell him. Right.

Fortunately by the time he gets outside, it’s dark and the lobby is deserted and there aren’t many people outside where Derek is - no two ways about it - lurking under the tree. Stiles ambles up to him, hands in his pockets, sees Derek cross his arms defensively over his chest. “What, you miss me that much?” Derek’s shoulders go a little stiff and  _ oh _ .

Stiles tries not to roll his eyes. “It’s only been two weeks,” he says softly, and Derek shrugs.

“I know,” he says, barely audible, not meeting Stiles’ eyes. “It’s just - it’s too quiet.”

Stiles runs his hands up Derek’s chest, dislodging his crossed arms, loops his arms around Derek’s neck. He’s found Derek’s a lot less weird about touching in public if Stiles approaches it like he’s asking for Derek’s attention, not the other way round. “I missed you too,” Stiles says, and Derek sags against him, breathing against Stiles’ hair, hands flat on his back. 

He tries to imagine Derek on his own. It’s not a great mental image, knowing what he does about what kind of thought processes Derek stumbles into when he’s left unsupervised. Or - no. Stumbled into. Past tense. Things are different now. A lot of time has passed. Things are different; they’re different. Derek’s going to be fine, and so is Stiles, and so is the pack. It’s just... hard. Harder than Stiles expected, not even having the excuse of psychic wolfy-feedback that most of the others do. But there’s no denying that he can feel his homesickness dissipating just standing here.

“It’ll get better,” he murmurs, and Derek sighs.

“I know,” he says, and he sounds cranky about it. “It’s just…”

“Hard,” Stiles suggests, when Derek says nothing for a long moment. Derek sighs again, presses his face a little more firmly into the side of Stiles’ neck.

“Yeah,” he admits, and Stiles doesn’t say anything, because it’s hard for him, too.

***

Derek doesn’t visit him often - that is, he doesn’t visit often by Derek standards; by werewolf standards. By human standards, he’s there almost creepily frequently, to the point where Stiles’ roommate Rashid starts asking, pointedly, why him and Derek didn’t just get a place in town. Stiles has no idea how he’d explain that they couldn’t have done that because Derek can’t be gone for that long without leaving their territory open to poachers. Instead he just shrugs and turns back to his textbook. Stiles and Rashid were never going to be best bros, anyway. 

That’s another thing that surprised him; he’s never been popular, but he’s always been able to get along with most people. He’d figured the same thing would happen at Berkeley, but while his general affability holds true - no mortal enemies or anything - he finds himself even more on the margins of campus life than he was in high school, pre-Pack. The stranger part is that it doesn’t bother him. It’s not that he dislikes anybody particularly; he just  _ doesn’t care _ very much about whether or not he makes new friends. Every time he thinks that’s weird, or Dad asks whether he’s made friends at school, he experiences a disorienting sense of… contentment. Because ultimately, he’s got his pack, no matter who else he meets or doesn’t meet.

He doesn’t try to verbalize it, but if this is how wolves feel all the time, it explains a lot.

As little as it usually bothers him, though, it can be a disadvantage at times; like when the one remaining copy of a text he needs for the week’s Anthro reading is mysteriously absent. 

Annoyed, he checks the catalogue for a third time, but it still stubbornly insists that the book is checked in and should be on the shelf.

He spends another thirty minutes going floor to floor, table to table, hunting for anyone sitting with the book closed, not-in-use at their elbow, but in the end he gives up and downloads it illegally from the Internet before throwing himself into a chair in the second-floor lounge to study angrily.

He’s in a foul mood, and so of course this is when Andrew finds him.

Stiles went for coffee with Andrew exactly once. Andrew is in two of his classes. Andrew wears waistcoats and skate shoes and dark-rimmed glasses and pulls it all off, because Andrew knows exactly how good-looking he is.

Andrew is also terminally incapable of taking no for an answer.

It’s not that Stiles doesn’t  _ like _ Andrew. Andrew’s smart, and hot, and is into a lot of stuff that Stiles is into, and if he were looking, Stiles would totally have wanted to hit that the first second Andrew suggested it, fifteen minutes into the first and only LGBTQA Society Club Crawl Stiles ever attended. College is supposed to be about experimentation, after all. 

It’s just that it’s really hard to explain that the reason you’re not interested is because you’re sort of involved with this guy? Who’s a few years older? And a werewolf? And by the way even if Stiles were a free man (which he isn’t), dating anybody is kind of complicated and problematic due to the whole werewolf pack thing?

Like, he knew it was going to be complicated for the others who were heading off sans-significant other. But the whatever-it-is between him and Derek is so weirdly inviolable that it literally never even crossed his mind that said complications were going to apply to  _ him _ .

Andrew keeps trying. Stiles keeps trying to explain without actually explaining. Stiles gets progressively more annoyed that he is for some reason expected to  _ offer explanation _ . 

“Hey handsome,” Andrew greets him, dropping down into the chair across from him. The chair creaks alarmingly but does not collapse and dump Andrew on his ass. 

“Hey,” Stiles says, keeping his eyes on his tablet. His tone, he thinks, is at best neutral, but apparently  Andrew doesn’t hear it that way.

“Haven’t seen you all week,” Andrew says, drumming his fingers on the cover of the book in his lap. Stiles squints at it - the book in his lap that Stiles just spent  _ a million years _ hunting through the entire building. He sighs and looks back to his reading. Too late now.

“Been busy,” Stiles tells him, hunching down a little further in his chair, his feet up on the little round table in the middle of the cluster.

“Yeah, me too. Actually I’ve only got a minute before I’ve got to meet my study group.” He pauses, as if expecting Stiles to make a contribution, but when he doesn’t, he continues. “Hey, I can see you’re swamped. How about I buy you a cup of coffee after? My group’s done in an hour. We can catch up.”

Stiles lowers his tablet and looks up, pressing his lips together. “Dude, listen--”

“And before you just shut me down again,” Andrew says quickly, cutting him off with a charming smile, “let it be known that I will go as high as coffee  _ and  _ muffin.”

Stiles rubs a hand over his face. “Look, we’ve had this conversation.”

Andrew shrugs, smile undimmed. “It’s just coffee.”

“Friends coffee? One hundred percent platonic coffee? Because I’ve told you--”

“You haven’t really told me anything,” Andrew points out. “Just that you can’t. Not why. You don’t have a boyfriend, do you?” Andrew only ever asks after a boyfriend, even though Stiles introduced himself as bi and has corrected him twice. 

Stiles grits his teeth. “It’s complicated.”

“Coffee’s not.” The smile doesn’t move; gets sunny and sly. Stiles feels himself getting annoyed, his head hurting like it’s under pressure. He has a nearly overwhelming urge to pinch his nostrils shut, try to get his ears to pop.

Stiles give his head a shake. “No means no, dude. Didn’t anybody ever tell you that?”

“Aw, come on,” says Andrew, and Stiles can feel his impending headache becoming a real one, and when he speaks again he can’t help but put a tiny little push of will behind the word:

“ _ Enough. _ ”

Andrew blinks, sitting back. Just like that, the pressure is gone, and Andrew is standing. He mutters something like “see you later,” and then he’s gone. 

His phone buzzes in his pocket before Andrew is even out of sight.

“I’m fine,” he says, and on the other end of the call, Derek huffs out a breath. 

“Stiles?”

It takes a second for Stiles to realize what’s happening. “I - Derek?” He never even looked at the screen.

“Yeah.”

For a moment, neither of them speaks. Stiles listens to Derek breathe on the other end.

“Wait, did you just call me because of freaky timing or did you know I was --”

Derek doesn’t answer for a long time. 

***

Stiles doesn’t get home for the weekend as often as he’d like - he’d  _ like _ to go home  _ every  _ weekend, but sometimes reality and due dates just don’t allow for that. He feels it more keenly with every passing week, which is something it took him a while to notice, because isn’t homesickness supposed to be something that gets  _ less  _ acute over time, not more? All the college guides he’s ever read have lied to him, apparently.

The wolves all talk about it, and for them, it’s to be expected; it’s hard being away from the pack. But for Stiles, it’s not just the pack. It’s the place. When he passes through the wards at the town border on the Tuesday afternoon preceding Thanksgiving long weekend, he breathes an audible sigh of relief, some tension he didn’t fully realize he was carrying dissipating instantly.

And then something else washes over him, like a blast of warm air, a wave of goosebumps prickling up all over him. It’s weird enough that he nearly swerves because it feels like a  _ greeting _ , there-and-then-gone.

Stiles takes a deep breath, lets it out, focuses - but whatever it was, it’s gone now. He’s been the magic-wielding member of a werewolf pack for like three years, so his scale for “unsettling” is a little skewed, but what the  _ hell _ .

Dad’s still at work when he gets to the house, so Stiles carries all his crap inside and starts a load of laundry. By the time he’s putting together a sandwich, it’s still bugging him, so he pulls out his phone.

When she picks up, Aunt Pearl’s voice is tinny and distorted. “Hey kiddo. I said I was going to be there for Thursday and I meant it. Don’t you trust me?”

The sound of howling wind in the background makes Stiles squint at his phone before bringing it back to his ear. “I thought you were in India.”

“Tibet, actually. I’ve got plenty of time and my flights all planned out. What’s up?”

Another howl of wind makes her end of the call crackle and squeal before evening out again.

Stiles considers asking if his septuagenarian great-aunt is climbing a Tibetan mountain in a storm by herself but decides the answer will only upset him. “So you know how we set up all those wards along the territory borders before I went away in September?”

“Yes, it was top-notch work, despite Alan’s nitpicking.” Stiles is really, really glad he probably never has to do that again, because two days circumnavigating Hale territory with a bottle of essential oils and trailed by Aunt Pearl and Doctor Deaton critiquing his every move is not an experience he’s eager to repeat. “Still holding strong?”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s not the problem. I was just wondering…”

Another squeal of static gives him a minute to dither and hesitate, but eventually Aunt Pearl huffs out a breath and asks “Zim?”

He huffs out his own sigh. “Is there any reasons that the wards might make me feel… I guess, homesick?”

“Oh, Zim.” He can practically  _ hear  _ her indulgent smile. 

“It’s not like that,” he insists. “It’s been getting worse over the last couple of months. When I’m not here, it’s like an itch at the back of my head. And I can’t settle, but not like I usually can’t settle.”

Aunt Pearl hums to herself. “You sound like a wolf,” she murmurs. “Any mood swings?”

“No, nothing like that. It’s not exactly like the wolves. It’s got stuff in common, but it’s more like… I don’t like letting the town out of my sight for too long. And then I drive back into town and everything’s fine again.” He remembers Derek’s last couple of visits, the particular wash of relief when they can be in contact again. He squirms in his chair. “Well, mostly.”

“Hmm,” Aunt Pearl says, and now he can hear her calculating expression. “Well. The wards shouldn’t cause that. They were designed not to need a permanent link to the original worker. They shouldn’t be able draw from you when you’re not inside them. Or influence you at all, come to that, apart from alarms.”

“Yeah, that was the whole point. Rechargeable, reusable…”

“And you say this wasn’t an issue right away. It came on over time?”

“Yeah. And there’s... something else.” He hesitates.

“Zim?” 

He sighs again. “When I crossed back into town it felt like something… happy to see me.”

“What? The wards? That shouldn’t be--”

“No, not the wards. At least, I don’t think so? I don’t know.” He drags a hand through his hair, frustrated. “It was weird. Not exactly unpleasant? But weird.”

She hums again. “Interesting.” Because Aunt Pearl does have a gift for understatement. “Strange. The wards shouldn’t be able to mimic sentience - at least, not ones meant to stand alone. Some spells can feel very much alive, particularly the mean ones. But in this case, given everything, I’m inclined to say that if it was something dangerous, you’d just… know. You’re--”

There’s another blast of noise from her end, and whatever she says next is lost in eight seconds of static.

“Aunt Pearl?”

“--ee you in a day or two, we’ll talk about it then. Try not to worry.”

“Try not to worry? Are you kidding? Now I’m definitely going to--”

“--to go, I’ll let you know when I--”

There’s one last crackle of noise, and then the line goes dead.

“Fuck,” says Stiles, before hitting End and tossing down his phone.

_ Try not to worry _ . It’s like she’s never even met him.

***

Aunt Pearl misses Thanksgiving dinner.

“Now, look, it isn’t as though I didn’t try,”she says over a connection even worse than their last call, not only crackly and tinny but barely audible; he pictures her shouting into a pay phone in Lhasa Gonggar Airport and people staring. “But even I can’t control the weather.”

Stiles rolls his eyes but privately concedes that this is probably true. Somehow it’s never occurred to him to ask, but he suspects it would just get him a lecture about natural disasters and balance and using magic for selfish ends.

“They’ve only got about a hundred days a year of navigable weather and apparently today’s not one of them,”she’s saying, as Scott appears in the doorway of the office where Stiles is perched on an armchair, phone pressed tightly to his ear. Scott, who has doubtless been listening in on the call, gives him an exaggerated frowny-face when Stiles shakes his head. “We should be out of here in the morning, or the next day.”

“So I guess we’ll see you for Christmas, then,” Stiles says, shrugging at Scott, who ruffles his hair and leaves again. 

“Count on it,” says Aunt Pearl. “And Zim, I wanted to tell youzzzzzzzzzzk--”

Silence follows. The automated international operator informs him that his call has been disconnected. Stiles swears and presses the End key, tossing his phone down on the chair cushion and shoving his hands through his hair before following it down.

He’s disappointed, but it’s not only that. Aunt Pearl was gone from his life for too long for her missing holidays to be much of a gut-punch - he’s still in the place where it’s a pleasant, unlooked-for surprise that she makes it at all. Come right down to it he’s just too  _ grateful _ , in the aftermath of the past summer’s revelations, to feel anything else. But he’d wanted to talk to her some more about the weird thing with the wards - Deaton is always a little distant with him, a little too much the teacher to answer his vaguer questions helpfully, and anyway, he really doesn’t want to broach the topic of the other things with Deaton at all.

Like the Derek thing.

Thus far it’s been mostly ignorable, unobtrusive and hard to put a boundary around, but while it might be related to his strangely acute homesickness, it’s now becoming clear that it’s a separate issue. He teased Derek a little about it at first, his frequent visits, his need to make sure Stiles smelled like him, but only a little, because that’s just a werewolf thing and something Stiles was expecting. In fact apart from intensity it’s not much different from the way Scott and the others are with him when they’ve been apart for long enough. Scent is important to wolves. If the scent is wrong, the person seems wrong. 

But it’s not only Derek. The last time Derek visited Stiles had trouble letting go, too, though he made himself do it in the end. And that’s… not anything he’s ever read about, not even in the rare (but not as rare as he’d have thought) human-werewolf pairings that anybody’s actually written about in what you’d call “mainstream” lycanthropically-focused publications.

And then there’s the third thing. The dream thing.

Even before he got mixed up with werewolves and magic and assorted related supernatural  adventures, Stiles always had strange dreams. As a kid they were unusually vivid and coherent, to the point where he’d wake up and narrate an entire adventure to his parents over his breakfast cereal. When he got older, his meds made his dreams intense and  _ weird  _ for a long time. And sprinkled in between these, increasing in frequency the more magic he used, were the dreams he later came to realize were memories, or something like.

In his head, he calls them  _ might-have-beens _ . Some of them are memories and some of them are unrealized possibilities, past, present or future, and some of them are a confusing combination of the two. In the immediate aftermath of the spell being broken he would sometimes tumble into them while awake, drifting off like a daydream, but harder to break away. Once, about a month after the breaking of the spell dumped a lifetime’s memories back into his brain, he went too far, too deep, and had to be dragged back by force. He scared the crap out of Derek: woke to him cradling Stiles in his arms and begging him to wake up in a terrified, broken whisper, like he’d been saying “please, please” for days without rest. After that he promised both Dad and Derek both that he’d be more careful, and he was. 

But he couldn’t help dreaming.

As often as not, they’re disconnected fragments. Sometimes they’re good worlds and sometimes they’re bad, but usually he doesn’t get any more than a glimpse of any given possibility. Aunt Pearl told him that the way it’s always been for their family has always been more instinctive than the way it works for Stiles - a feeling about what’s possible or not, what’s easy or hard to bring about, rather than Stiles’ scattershot highlights reels. She theorized that the longer the memories had to resettle into his mind, the less like real memories the might-have-beens would become, and the less access he’d have to them.

He’s not sure what it means that this only sort of seems to be true.

He’s wondered if it’s a side-effect of the spell, of spending so long with his abilities strangled, but then nothing about his brain has ever worked quite the way it was supposed to, anyway.

From a few rooms away, he can hear the pack - talking, preparing dinner, roughhousing. He can hear Dad’s voice laughing at something and Melissa scolding Isaac and dishes and cutlery clinking together. He wonders that he’s been left alone this long but maybe Scott warned them off.

He gets up eventually, shoves his phone back into his pocket and makes his way back towards the noise of his pack. The rebuilt Hale house has pretty good soundproofing - SOP for houses built for werewolves, apparently - so they sound further away than they are, but it takes him a minute before he comes out on the open-sided hallway overlooking the living room and dining room. A windowed half wall topped with a butcher block separates the dining room from the kitchen, and right now Erica and Boyd are perched on stools pulled up to it, chopping vegetables. In the kitchen itself Stiles can see Derek and Melissa moving around, probably directing everybody else who’s playing chef’s assistant. 

Everyone else is sprawled across furniture or stretched out on the floor in front of the TV - even Chris is sitting comfortably on the sofa, a mug in his hand that even Stiles’ puny human nose can tell is Melissa’s mulled wine, from the big pot simmering in the kitchen. Stiles silently congratulates her; Chris is always a lot more relaxed at these functions if you give him a drink the second he arrives, and right now he’s smiling, nodding along as Allison, one hand skritching absently in Scott’s hair, tells him some story.

He misses Derek slipping out of the kitchen and coming up the stairs, doesn’t notice him until he leans against the bannister next to him. “You okay?” Derek asks, pressing their shoulders together, and Stiles nods.

“Yeah. Just… thinking.”

“About what?” Derek asks curiously - shrewdly. Stiles looks at him, finds Derek looking at him in a way that says he wants to stare, but doesn’t want to seem too intent.

“You think you’re subtle,” Stiles says with a frown, “but you’re not.”

Derek smirks a little, shrugs. Stiles sighs, looking back out over the pack. “I’m just… glad to be back,” he says. “I mean… here.”

Derek’s silent for a minute, and then he asks: “What did Pearl say?”

Stiles hasn’t actually told Derek - or anyone else - about the weird homesickness, or the way it all but vanished at the town border, but he’s not surprised that Derek realized  _ something _ was up.

“She said she was stuck in an airport,” Stiles says, frustrated. “And that we’d talk about it at Christmas. And I shouldn’t worry.”

Derek snorts a laugh, and Stiles points at him. “Yes, exactly!”

Derek sobers a little. “Want to talk about it?” he asks then, which is basically code for “is it dangerous?” and despite himself, Stiles finds himself shaking his head before really thinking about it.

“Not… not yet,”he says, leaning more heavily into Derek’s side until he loops an arm around Stiles’ waist.

He feels Derek studying his profile. “Does this have anything to do with how glad you are to be back in town?”

Stiles looks at him again, eyes wide, finds Derek with his head tilted to one side, eyebrows arched. “Just now was the fourth time you’d mentioned it, in one way or another,” he explains, and Stiles feels his mouth fall open with surprise.

“I hadn’t even realized,” he says, half to himself, and sighs. “I didn’t even realize it was happening, not really, until I came back. It was like… when I’m not here, I worry. Like something will happen if I’m not watching.”

“That sounds like you all the time,” Derek points out, voice soft, gently teasing.

“Granted,” Stiles agrees, a little sheepishly. “But this is more physical. Like… I  _ need _ to be here. Like it wants me back, like it’s pulling on me.”

“You sound like an Alpha,” Derek says, tone somewhere between thoughtful and amused. Stiles gives him a quizzical look, and Derek explains: “When I leave our territory, I feel like I need to turn around and come back. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

Stiles presses his lips together, imagines how that must have been for Laura, all those years ago in New York; worrying about Derek  _ and _ their land, unable to silence the worry with reason. If it’s anything like this, it must have been awful.

“It’s not exactly physical, though,” Derek continues. “More a feeling. I’ve never heard it described as a pull.”

“Does it happen to other wolves?”

Derek shakes his head. “Not usually. Sometimes if you’re born and raised on the land, you’ll feel its absence, a little. Laura always felt it, because she was  _ going _ to be Alpha - that’s what it’s for, Mom said once. To remind an Alpha to think of their territory. But, like I said, it’s not a pull. Just a feeling. And I’ve never heard of it happening to a human. Stiles,” he says, pulling a little with the arm around Stiles’ waist until he turns to face him, “are you sure this isn’t a problem? Could it have to do with the wards, or…?”

“I’m sure,” Stiles says, because he was pretty sure, even before Aunt Pearl confirmed it. “And I told you, it doesn’t feel  _ bad _ .” At least, not “bad” as in “sinister.” The weird, insistent feeling of wrongness, the buzzing sense of dislocation, those he could do without. But while there’s a part of him that would rather it would go away, there’s another part that feels it’s important, somehow. Not that he knows how to explain that to Derek.

Derek, though, only nods. “Okay,” he says, and tightens his arm briefly around Stiles, rubbing their cheeks together for a second before heading back downstairs. Stiles remains, blinking and wrongfooted, until he realizes that several members of the pack are looking up at him and grinning big, stupid grins. Erica flashes him finger guns. Stiles sighs -  _ why? _ \- and goes to join them.

***

Dinner is chaos. It would have to be, with this many people at one table, talking and laughing and handing dishes back and forth, even if most of the people at the table weren’t werewolves. By the time they’ve made it through dinner and progressed to pies (no less than  _ five _ different kinds), Stiles is essentially drunk off the combination of good food, fatigue and company. When the party migrates back into the living room, Stiles settles in on the couch and just lets the evening ebb and flow around him. Occasionally someone will come and sit with him for a while, or bring him a drink or a tart or something, and for a little while, pile themselves around him to pretend to pay attention to A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving but actually to talk over it except for the song.

Nobody mentions anything like the weird feeling in Stiles’ head, and after all this time most of the pack is pretty well-conditioned to mention Creepy Unsettling Things as soon as they happen. Mostly Stiles lets himself forget about it and drift, instead, warmly content, only giving up his prime spot on the couch when he has to get up to use the bathroom.

The bathroom door is closed, but he can hear a voice behind it - Dad’s, but there’s something else, too. Something followed by the flushing of the toilet and a low murmur. 

He knows that sound, is pushing open the door, fuelled by nothing but muscle memory, before he can think about it. 

Dad looks up, eyes wide, from where he’s stroking Melissa’s hair back from her face. Melissa turns and sees him and just sighs, accepting the cup of water Dad’s handing her. They both went a little tense when he came in, but neither of them says anything.

“Uh, sorry,” Stiles says, because he did just walk into a bathroom without knocking; weird, even if the door wasn’t closed all the way. “Are - is everything okay?”

Melissa rinses out her mouth, spits, and then drinks the rest of the cup. “It’s fine, kiddo. Just not feeling well, that’s all.”

“Must be that bug that was going around at the hospital last week,” Dad says, meeting Stiles eyes with a grimace for only a second before his gaze skips on past, over his shoulder, into the hallway. Dad turns back to Melissa. “We should get you home,” he says, one hand between her shoulderblades, and she rolls her eyes at him.

“Yeah, thanks,” she says, brushing a hand down Stiles’ arm as she edges past him into the hallway, followed closely by Dad, who pauses only briefly.

“See you later, kid,” Dad says, with a brief, one-armed hug before he moves away.

Stiles stands staring after them for what is probably a weirdly long time. He stays there through listening to Dad and Melissa say their goodbyes, through the front door opening and closing, through the sound of Dad’s cruiser rumbling to life and disappearing out of earshot down the drive. He feels rooted to the spot, confused and aware of a cold weight somewhere under his ribs, because his dad just  _ lied  _ to him.

Dad’s a good liar, really. Most people wouldn’t catch it.  But Stiles, an accomplished liar himself, has eighteen years of experience with his father’s tells, and that one? The meeting-the-eyes-and-looking-away one, as though something else has just caught Dad’s attention? That’s the one that crops up when he’s keeping something from Stiles that he thinks will freak Stiles out.

Well. So much for not worrying.

***

Stiles stays at the house that night, partly to give Dad and Melissa some privacy and partly because Derek loops an arm around Stiles on the couch after dinner and dozes off that way. Stiles wakes him up enough to get him up the stairs, trusting the others to find their own way out.

Derek has been getting better about touching, even with the others, and he touches Stiles freely, most of the time. Actually, that’s too mild; he touches Stiles like he’s got a right to it, moves him around like a cranky body pillow when Stiles is having insomnia and only aggressive spooning will get him back to sleep. But so far the touching has mostly been with clothes on. Having grown up in a family of werewolves leaves a person with remarkably little body shyness but there’s apparently a huge contextual difference between that and being touched with  _ intent _ . So Derek follows Stiles upstairs and into the master bedroom - for all intents and purposes, though no one has said so,  _ their _ bedroom - and sinks down on the edge of the bed, but from there, Stiles isn’t sure how to proceed.

Derek is listing slightly to one side, eyes half-closed; he’s in jeans and a t-shirt, his feet bare, and he’s radiating contentment in a way that even Stiles can sense. Stiles strokes his hair, leaves his hand on top of Derek’s head, crouches down in front of him. 

“You wanna sleep in your jeans?”

Derek rumbles a negative, pushes into Stiles’ hand like a cat. He reaches for his fly, thumbs open the button and the zipper, but stops, eyes opening a little bit to meet Stiles’ gaze.  _ Happy? _ say Derek’s eyebrows. Stiles rolls his eyes.

“I can…?” Stiles tries, and Derek looks into his eyes for a moment longer before nodding, letting his own eyes slide closed again, so… well. That seems like a yes. Okay then.

Stiles pushes gently on Derek’s shoulder so that he shuffles back onto the bed, and as he moves Stiles hooks fingers in Derek’s waistband; lets Derek’s motion pull the jeans down and off, carefully easing them over Derek’s bare feet. He turns around to hang the jeans over the chair in the corner, turns back to see Derek sprawled across the bedspread in his t-shirt and underwear, eyes still half-open and watching Stiles.

Unaccountably, Stiles blushes. He hurries to get himself undressed down to boxers and piles up his clothes in the same chair before moving over towards the bed. 

They won’t have sex. They’re still working their way up to that, and Stiles can be patient, but while they’ve slept in the same bed more times than Stiles can count, by now, and Derek has undressed Stiles often enough (he’s always had the habit of falling asleep in strange places), this is the first time Stiles has done the undressing. And it’s not that he doesn’t know Derek trusts him. Derek has trusted him for a long time, he thinks, as he pulls down the blankets, gently shoving at Derek’s legs until he gets himself under the covers. But this… this thing where Stiles is  _ taking care _ of Derek? This is… new.

The room is warm, and the blankets are heavy, and so it should be  _ too _ warm when Derek pulls Stiles in, wakes up enough to rearrange them to his liking before settling back down. But it’s not. Somehow, despite Derek putting off half again the average human amount of body heat, it’s just… right.

Stiles falls asleep with Derek’s warm breath against the back of his neck.

***

_ “Stiles, come on! It’s almost time!”  _

_ Mom’s voice is a bright echo through the trees, and Stiles nearly trips over an exposed root in his haste. He leaps over a bush, ducks under a low-hanging branch, and slides messily down an embankment before he can see her again, on the path just ahead. He can hear footsteps behind him, and  a moment later a body crashes into him, bowls him over into the carpet of needles. He’s muddy, but unharmed. Derek stands over him, panting and grinning. Above them, above the canopy of the close-growing trees, old and thick-trunked this deep in the forest, the moon is full, and Derek’s eyes glow yellow. Derek is thirteen years old, and Stiles is nine. _

_ “Derek!” Laura shouts from up ahead. More voices join in, mocking, and Derek rolls his eyes, reaches out a hand to pull Stiles to his feet _ .

_ “Boys” comes Talia’s voice, then, and both of them scramble to catch up. _

_ Mom and Ms. Talia are walking side by side, orbited loosely by the others. Mom holds her red book. Luke trails them a little, pacing Grandma Rose and Natalie on his shoulders, and Peter trails a little further back,  keeping an eye on little Rosie who’s trying to keep up with the older kids but keeps circling back to her parents. Trudy has her hands in the pockets of her sweater, watching her family with an indulgent smile, her rounded belly not slowing her down at all. Stiles almost collides with Dad, who has Scott by one hand.  _

_ This is the first time Scott has been allowed to come out for the full moon, because Mom said he should meet everybody, a decision reached after Scott’s last really bad asthma attack; an ambulance came to school and everything. Scott’s mom was going to be here too, but she had to go to work at the last minute. Scott was a little annoyed at first by the required hand-holding, especially since Stiles was allowed to roam free, but Stiles has been in the woods on a full moon before and he knows the rules. Anyway, Scott is staring around with wide eyes now, too awed to complain. _

_ “Stiles,” says Scott in a loud whisper, around Dad’s hip, “are you really gonna to do magic?” _

_ Stiles grins at him, ignores the way Dad jostles him, and shrugs. “Mom is,” he tells his best friend. “I’m not old enough yet. It’s not my ‘sponsibility.” _

_ “Responsibility,” Derek corrects him haughtily, giving Scott a look like he doesn’t even get why he has to be here. _

_ “Responsibility,” Graham mimics him, in a high, snotty voice, and Stiles giggles. Derek gives Graham a shove, and Graham laughs, taking off at a run to catch up with Laura, who’s scouting up ahead. _

_ They splash through a creek, the kids squealing at the cold, and then Stiles can feel it. _

_ “Come here, baby,” says Mom, reaching back without looking, and Dad gives him a little push as he scurries up the rise to grab her hand. Mom squeezes his fingers, swings their joined hands. “Yeah,” she says, softly, like it’s meant only for her and Stiles, even though the wolves can certainly hear every word. “That’s it. You feel it?” _

_ Stiles just nods, staring ahead, wide-eyed. He can’t see it, yet, but it isn’t far. A little further ahead, the path disappears, and the trees lean in close, the shadows between them darker than they should be.  _

_ It should be harder than it is to pass between the tightly-woven branches, but it’s almost like they part before them; Mom holds up one hand, and holds Stiles tightly with the other, and then they’re through, and Stiles is nearly blinded by the light. _

***

“Wait.”

Speaking is what wakes him - he says the word aloud, eyes flying open, a puff of mist forming and dissipating almost immediately. He gasps when the rest of his body catches up and the cold hits him, stumbles when he realizes where he is. 

The woods. Cold. The moon.

It’s not full, but waxing, and it makes the forest look bright as midday, but feel colder. Stiles rubs hands up and down his arms, feeling dizzy with the sense of dislocation, confused and frightened for a long series of panted breaths before he realizes he’s still on pack land, that he can feel it, the wards humming gently in the distance, the land itself knowing his presence and buzzing with soft feedback.

“The  _ fuck _ ,” he says aloud, shaking with more than just the cold. He was in bed with Derek. He was in bed with Derek, at the house. He was-- he looks down and sees that however he got here, he apparently at least had the presence of mind to put on sweatpants and shoes, though he’s not wearing socks and has only a short-sleeved t-shirt on. It’s  _ fucking cold _ , and he’s out in the woods in the middle of the night and he doesn’t know how he got here and it’s been ages since he last had a panic attack and anyway this is not a good time for one.

He looks around again. Nothing looks immediately familiar, beyond the strong, comforting background sense of  _ ours _ that tells him he’s on Hale land. And fair enough; he hasn’t walked every inch of this forest, certainly hasn’t seen every tree, every rock, though he’s seen a hell of a lot more than probably any other plain old human in Beacon Hills. The moon is bright enough to see, but the trees here are big and old, their crowns leant close together like old women gossiping. There’s no breeze - the air is, in fact, eerily still - but still a vague sense of something whispering, murmuring just out of earshot. But for the whispers it reminds him of the clusters of ward trees scattered around Hale house, where a person can step into the shadow of the trees and to most senses simply… disappear.

He feels cold and he feels confused and he feels a little scared but under all of that he feels...

...welcome.

_ Something is waiting for me. _

The thought comes out of nowhere, dropped into his mind like a stone tossed into a still pond, and his whole body jerks in reaction, his head whipping around to stare deeper into the shadows under the trees where the trunks are closer, the dark thicker, richer somehow.

_ That wasn’t a dream _ , he thinks, and takes one step.

“Stiles!”

It’s Derek’s voice, Derek crashing through the underbrush with no care for grace or stealth. Stiles turns around, and then he hears another voice, and then another - Scott, and Erica.

And then he sees Derek, as he pushes his way out into the open around a close-growing grove of trees and claps eyes on Stiles. Derek’s eyes, glowing red, fade back to the usual green and Derek crushes him into a hug without preamble. Stiles goes with a surprised huff, and they’re still standing like that when the others catch up with them.

“Stiles!” Scott exclaims, relief evident in every line of his body, and he moves as though to join in the hug but thinks better of it when Derek still doesn’t let go. Instead, he turns to lift his head and howl, long and low - probably to let the others know they’ve found Stiles and they can call off the search.

Stiles’ ribs are starting to seriously complain by the time Derek pulls back enough to look into Stiles’ face.

“Are you okay?” he asks, steady and urgent. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine,” Stiles says quickly, thinking that Derek must have known that, surely knew that before he dragged Stiles into a frantic hug, but not wanting to bring it up. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t--”  _ Don’t apologize _ , Stiles hears, even as Derek stops himself, cups a hand around the back of Stiles’ neck. “I woke up and you were gone,” he tells Stiles. “I didn’t even hear you leave. What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Stiles tells him honestly, as the answering howls of the rest of the pack echo in the distance. “I went to sleep, I had a dream, and then I woke up here. Well, over there,” he amends, pointing to the spot a few feet away.

Derek is staring intently into his face. “You’re sure?” he asks.

It’s strange, but in the face of Derek’s worry, Stiles feels a lot calmer. Now that Derek is here, that he’s  _ found _ , he doesn’t really feel freaked out anymore. A little worried, but not like he’s in danger. “I’m sure,” he tells Derek seriously. “Nothing took me. I think I must have walked here.”

“You did,” Erica confirms. “We tracked you all the way from the house.”

“Dude, you haven’t sleepwalked since we were like ten,” Scott says, scrubbing a hand through his hair and continuing to look worried. It’s true. Stiles started sleepwalking not long after Mom was diagnosed. It was finding him two blocks away in his pyjamas that first made Dad send him to therapy. But he hasn’t done it in years.

Stiles remembers the dream, then; on the rare occasion that he has normal dreams he sometimes surfaces from them with the details all muddled but the big picture clear, the way you remember the worldbuilding in a fantasy movie. Immersive, but not memorable in the small things. This dream was the opposite; it’s the details that stay.

_ It wasn’t a dream _ , he thinks again, turning away from Derek to stare into the trees again.  _ At least, not just a dream. _

It would hardly be the first time one of his might-have-beens came to him more like a dream than a vision, but this was definitely the most coherent one he’s experienced that way, so far.

“We should go back,” Erica says then, and Stiles turns back to see her shifting from foot to foot, eyes aglow. “It’s weird here.”

It is. Stiles noticed the quiet, the stillness of the air. Now he notices the details: no animal noises, no birds, no bats. Nothing moving. Everything quiet, like it’s… waiting.

He looks at Derek and catches him staring in the same direction that keeps drawing Stiles’ attention; the deeper shadows under the trees. But presently he looks at Stiles instead, rubs hands down his arms.

“You’re cold,” he says softly. “We need to go back.”

And Stiles, who has been shivering all this time, doesn’t argue.

***

He gets a brief reprieve after Thanksgiving in that the headaches don’t immediately return. It’s never consistent, really, but Stiles is just too glad not to have to brave 8:30am classes with a persistent background migraine to think about it very much. He throws himself back into classes and finishing projects early; he wants to be able to book it out of town at the first available opportunity. When he’s not in class he’s at the library, and when he’s not at the library he’s at Caffe Strada, Stiles’ favourite coffee shop right across the street from the south side of campus. He’s in there so often that he only has to catch the eye of the barista as he walks in and know she’s already preparing his order, unasked. He nods back, then shuffles into line to pay.

He’s distracted with annotating the last draft for his criminology paper in his head, so he doesn’t immediately clue in the to the presence of someone  _ not-baseline _ \- Lydia’s term for anyone Stiles can detect as not strictly ordinary-human; Scott’s word is a lot more colloquial but a lot more popular. More often than not he can just  _ tell  _ if someone is something…  _ else _ , even if whatever subconscious sense that alerts him to this fact doesn’t always give him much information beyond  _ that one _ . It takes him nearly a full minute to cast his gaze around the coffee shop and decide on the girl hunched over the tiny two-person table in the corner, high-end Macbook absorbing all of her attention. She hasn’t noticed him, but now that Stiles has noticed  _ her  _ he doesn’t know why he didn’t notice her earlier. Her energy is distinctively blue-feeling, which is not an outright indicator of anything, so far as he’s ever been able to tell, except a certain level of connection with one’s surroundings. It’s roughly the same flavour someone with latent magical abilities gives off, but it’s a lot stronger, a lot purer, here. Whatever she is, it’s not latent.

It could be considered rude to stare, but Stiles has learned the hard way that politeness has to take a backseat to the possibility that whatever non-baseline person he’s just encountered plans to kill him or anybody he likes.

She has white-blond hair with streaks of blue-green threaded through it, pale skin, and eyebrows so fair they’re nearly invisible. 

She looks  _ familiar _ .

She looks up, and her eyes widen, and Stiles knows she’s recognized him, too, as something  _ else _ . Face raised into the tiny spot lamp over her table, the light seems to hit her eyes strangely.

Stiles reaches the counter, pays for his order. When he turns around again she’s not exactly  _ staring _ anymore, just watching him, carefully, from behind her laptop screen. Taking a deep breath, Stiles makes his way over to her table.

“So, uh, this is gonna seem totally out of the blue and maybe rude, but I thought I knew all the supes on campus already.”

She raises one eyebrow. “Supes?”

Stiles laughs, because she seems taken aback rather than offended or hostile. “Sorry. Supernatural-adjacent. There’s a sort of a… I didn’t come up with the name. Sorry. Stiles Stilinski. It’s okay if you don’t shake.” He holds out a hand, anyway; the disclaimer has become standard, due to the number of were-and-other transfers who don’t like touching strangers; the usual way, hands palm-up, looks a little strange in casual settings.

She gives him a wary, calculating look, but she shakes.

“Gerda. I heard about you,” she said. The friendly neighbourhood witch doctor, right?”

Stiles laughs again. “Haven’t heard that one, but yeah, I guess.” Every so often he does favours for people. It keeps him in on the gossip and mostly keeps him out of trouble. “Can’t say the same for you. And you look…”

“...familiar,” she guesses, gaze turning shrewd. “It’s not a glamour, if that’s what you’re asking.”

She reaches for her coffee, tips it back for a long sip, eyes closed, and suddenly Stiles is back in the garden, Scott’s hand tight around his wrist, peering in through an open door, somewhere he’s not supposed to be.

Gerda Matinsalo.

She beats him to it. “Hale Pack,” she says, suddenly sitting up straight. “Beacon Hills.  _ Stilinski. _ ”

Stiles drops into the empty chair because some part of him knows what’s coming.

“You’re Sarah’s son,” she says then, and Stiles lets out a breath on a long sigh.

“And you used to have trouble breathing out of water,” he says back, feeling the sad smile form on his lips.

She beams, and he’s sure, though he was sure before. Gerda’s family travelled, her mother an architect, and when Stiles and Scott were about five they once happened upon Stiles’ mom in the Matinsalos’ living room, Gerda in her lap, webbed fingers and toes and bluish scales in full view. He’s met other mers since, though only in passing, and never in their natural forms the way he’d seen Gerda, that day.

“Guess you got over it, though,” he says, looking at her hands, nails painted flawless mint-green but otherwise blatantly human. If he didn’t know better he’d never have guessed, though Scott’s told him - in between convulsive sneezing fits - that mers have a distinctive, briney sort of scent. 

“By the time I started first grade,” Gerda agrees. She looks him up and down with a casual interest that gives way, slowly, to a sad frown. “I was sorry to hear about your mom.”

“Thanks,” he says. It’s happened more over the past six months or so; since the spell hiding most of her memory from the world, and since Stiles himself has been out and about in it a little more. He often encounters people who knew Sarah Stilinski, who recognize his last name, who greet him as “Sarah’s son” or ask after Aunt Pearl. Turns out Mom’s family was kind of a big deal, once upon a time. 

He’s run into more than one person who’s flat-out  _ afraid  _ of Aunt Pearl, though to be fair he wouldn’t have questioned that even before he knew about the whole powerful-hereditary-witch thing.

“You studying photography?” Stiles asks, gesturing to the pricey laptop and huge SLR camera sitting on the table between them.

“My minor,” says Gerda, spinning the laptop around to show him a camera roll full of what looks like pictures of… rusty sheet metal? “Mechanical engineering, the rest of the time. How about you?”

Stiles laughs, shrugs. “A little bit of everything - computer science, anthropology, criminology. Haven’t really decided.”

Gerda nods, sipping at her coffee again. They go over the usual topics - her parents are well, still in San Francisco, where they’d settled by the time Gerda was in high school. She runs a little side-business doing portraits, mostly run-of-the-mill headshots and weddings and the occasional thing for the Student Union, but she’s getting a reputation for photographing the kind of supernatural-adjacent clientele who often have trouble getting photographed.

“Bet you do a brisk business supplying for fake IDs,” Stiles says, laughing.

Gerda grins at him. “Like I’m going to admit that to a cop’s kid.”

At some point between the bottom of Stiles’ first coffee and the middle of her second, Stiles feels somebody watching him.

He freezes, and Gerda notices, narrows her eyes before looking up over Stiles’ shoulder. “Oh, that creep,” she mutters, and Stiles turns to see Andrew at the back of the line for the counter. Andrew has obviously seen him, judging by the deer-in-the-headlights look on his face.

As he and Gerda watch, Andrew turns and flees like he thinks they might chase him. The cafe door swings shut behind him, the bell jangling.

“The hell?” Stiles says, half to himself, but Gerda sits back in her chair, pale eyebrows rising.

“What’d you do to him?” she asks finally, when Stiles has turned back around.

“Huh?” Stiles asks.

Gerda points after Andrew. “He just lit out of here like his ass was on fire, and it wasn’t because of me.”

“Oh,” Stiles says, shoulders slumping. “We went out for drinks once - totally platonic drinks! - but he didn’t get the message, I guess. Kept pushing it. I shut him down pretty hard a couple of weeks ago.”

“Ugh,” Gerda says, with eloquent disgust. “You got lucky.”

Stiles feels his eyes widen. “Sorry, what?” 

“Oh, nothing.” Gerda’s tone is sour. “He’s probably a rapist, that’s all.”

Stiles almost drops his cup, going cold all over. “I hadn’t heard about anybody--”

“You wouldn’t have. Me and my friend Matty went clubbing a couple of months ago, and we met Andrew. They hit it off, and I was tired, so I went home alone. Next day I can’t find Matty anywhere, he’s not answering his phone, he misses all his classes. The day after that I found out his roommate found him passed out in front of their dorm and rushed him to the hospital. He was in a coma for two weeks.” 

“Holy shit,” Stiles breathes, glancing over his shoulder at the door. “What happened? Is he okay?”

Gerda gives an angry shrug. “He woke up. Didn’t remember anything, though. He dropped out for the semester, though. Went back to LA.”

“Jesus,” Stiles says, not sure what else to say. “I’m sorry.”

Gerda stares down into her coffee, whole body tense with rekindled frustration and anger, and sighs. She looks up at him then, expression considering. “Look,” she says, leaning in closer, hands around her cup. “I’m only telling you this because… well, I know what you are. I remember your mom. There’s a lot of talk about you and your pack, and it’s been a month and nobody official has found  _ anything  _ and maybe you can…”

“I’ll do what I can,” Stiles says; what he always says. He’s not the law around these parts or anything, and there are other workers out in the town who have occasionally taken issue with his “interference,” but his dad’s a cop and Stiles is probably the heaviest magical hitter on campus, at least.

Gerda stares at him a moment longer and then nods, decisively. “The cops were pretty sure somebody roofied him, but there wasn’t any proof and…” She drums her fingers on the tabletop. “Matty’s human. He wouldn’t have known if anything felt… off. And something feels  _ off _ .”

Stiles stares back at her, remembering that evening in the library, Andrew’s insistence, the strange rising pressure before Stiles  _ pushed _ back. It hadn’t occurred to him then that it might be something other than a guy who didn’t know how to take no for an answer, but not every supernatural being pings immediately on Stiles’ radar. Plenty of latent natures don’t show up unless you’re looking for them. And Stiles is resistant to glamours and the like, but he’s not completely immune. “Yeah,” he says, contemplatively. “I know what you mean.”

But then again - he tries to imagine Andrew, who is dense and pushy and  _ way _ too sure of his own appeal, intentionally hurting someone, or pushing things physically, and he just… can’t do it.

And of course, none of that explains Andrew turning tail and  _ running away _ just because he spotted Stiles across a room.

Stiles rubs at his eyes with the tips of his fingers. His headache’s coming back, apparently fighting the caffeine.

Only a few more days, Stiles thinks. Maybe it will get better.

***

_ Mom’s sick. _

_ They explained it to him, how he shouldn’t worry, how they caught it early and “got out in front of it,” how it will be okay. That it’s good they diagnosed Mom so quickly, that they can fight it better, knowing what they’re dealing with. Scott’s mom keeps saying that, that they “got out in front of it,” like they’re racing the cancer the way him and Scott do on their bikes. Scott doesn’t know what to say, just sits with Stiles and plays games and runs through the woods and listens, like usual. Derek and Laura and Graham don’t know what to say either, but Stiles doesn’t mind. They can’t get sick, so how would they know? _

_ He believes it more when Ms. Talia says it, puts a hand on his head and says they’ll beat this thing, like they’re all in this together. But she’s still a grown-up, and Stiles may only be little but he knows grown-ups lie. _

_ All of them except Aunt Pearl, who doesn’t say much at all about the hospital, about the drugs - just haunts Mom’s room and paces around the edges of their yard every morning and every night, face grim and angry. It’s one of the reasons he doesn’t quite believe the others right away - Stiles doesn’t know why everyone’s so angry, but he knows it started after that day at the library when he screamed at that man who tried to touch Mom, hit and kicked and got so angry and scared and out of his mind that he doesn’t even remember why. _

_ Aunt Pearl arrived a week and two days after that, tired and tense, and the grown-ups all disappear into the kitchen and talk in quiet voices for a long time, long enough that Mom carries him up to bed, tucks him in, and he doesn’t hear them leave. _

_ But they must leave, because it’s very late when he hears the door open and close and creeps down the stairs to see. He sees Dad and Ms. Talia and Uncle Peter and Aunt Pearl standing together in the front hall, faces shuttered and voices low - Mom’s not in sight, but she’s there; Stiles hears her say Dad’s name. Stiles can’t even ask, because he’s supposed to be asleep, has to stay quiet and small. _

_ He takes it all in like a picture: the way Ms. Talia holds herself, tall and menacing, the way she sometimes looks after the full moon and she’s still a little bit more wolf than usual. The way Uncle Peter always looks, just a little bit, though Uncle Peter is relaxed, hands in his pockets, smiling, despite the dark stains  and dried mud on his clothes. Stiles can’t hear what’s being said, but Aunt Pearl makes a face, smacks the back of Peter’s head when he laughs a little too loud. When he looks back on the memory later, Stiles thinks they look angry, but not afraid anymore, not the way they have since… since that day. That they look content.  _

_ When they all move into the kitchen, Stiles creeps down just far enough to touch Dad’s jacket where it’s thrown over the banister, to get a whiff of smoke off of it, like a bonfire but a little sweet. _

_ He’s not troubled. If anything, he’s less afraid as he tiptoes back up the stairs and back to bed, pulls the covers over his head. _

_ He knows this isn’t how it usually works, though he also knows that lots of things about his family aren’t like other people’s, either. He’s only seven, only just, but he’s learned when not to ask, when to figure things out for himself, when to wait. He’s known that since he was very small. _

_ Mom comes into his room early the next morning, ten days after that day at the library and eight days after her diagnosis, and wakes him with a kiss pressed into his hair.  _

_ “You have bad dreams, baby?” she asks, and he shakes his head, rubbing his eyes.  _

_ “Not a dream,” he says, and she sighs. _

_ “Who was that man?” he asks, starting to sit up, but she shakes her head, lays him back down.  _

_ “I don’t want you to worry about that man,” Mom says, and he sighs right back at her, short and annoyed. She laughs softly. “I don’t want you to worry,” she says again, “because there’s nothing to worry about anymore.” _

_ Stiles sinks down a little more, like he can hide against his He-Man sheets if he tries hard enough. He doesn’t remember everything about that day, but he remembers being scared. “‘Cause you an’ Ms. Talia an’ Aunt Pearl an’ Uncle Peter an’ Dad did something, didn’t they?” _

_ Mom narrows her eyes, not quite able to hide the smile. “I thought you were there,” she says. “You saw, huh?” _

_ “Saw ‘em come back,” Stiles admits, because Mom’s not mad. “They did something?” _

_ “Mmm,” agrees Mom, pulling up the covers and tucking them under his chin. “Do you know why?” _

_ Stiles stares up at the ceiling, thinking. “‘Cause of that  man,” he says. “He was gonna… gonna do something bad.” _

_ “That’s right,” Mom says. Her fingers find his under the blankets and squeeze. “And my brave boy, he saw, and warned us, and gave us time.” She presses her lips together, and her gaze goes, for a second or two, just a little distant. “And then we stopped him for good.” _

_ Stiles wonders, sometimes, if she dreams like he does. He might not remember everything he saw that day, but he knows he’s had dreams that were worse than anything he might have seen while awake. Dreams where Mom’s gone; dreams where Ms. Talia’s been forgotten, and Hale House is empty, the forest a place to be feared; where the town is just a little darker, everywhere, for a long time - further ahead than he can see, but he can still feel: where his grip on the world is slippery, unrooted, lost. _

_ But she sounds so certain, certain enough to be believed, and Stiles nods. He’s getting sleepy. “Mom, are you gonna be okay now?” he asks. _

_ “I’m gonna be fine, baby,” she tells him, and kisses him again, as the pull of sleep gets to be more than he can fight. “I’m gonna be around for a long, long time.” _

***

This time Stiles comes awake with enough flailing to roll right out of bed, taking the precarious stack of books and empty soda cans on his bedside table along for the ride.

When the debris settles, he hears Rashid’s loud sigh. “Dude, come  _ on _ , it’s like three in the morning.”

“Sorry,” Stiles croaks, dragging himself back up into his bed and yanking the blankets into some kind of order and trying to ignore his heaving chest and the tears on his face.

“Whatever,” is all the response he gets from the other side of the room.

He closes his eyes and tries to slow his breathing, tries to sleep.

Sleep doesn’t come.

Like, at all.

It feels like he’s vibrating on a low hum, and he doesn’t know  _ why _ . He’s felt restless for a few days but now it’s suddenly worse, not even letting him lie still for more than a few minutes at a time. 

Around 5:30am he gives up on trying to sleep and gets up for a run, hoping it will at least wake him up all the way. But halfway through his usual loop he’s flagging, and even making to the dining hall in time for waffles does nothing to clear the fog in his brain. He has a panicky moment where he can’t remember where his first class is, let alone what he did yesterday, before muscle memory takes him to the right building. 

He falls asleep in his morning lecture and gets back to his room to find Rashid has cleared out for the holidays. Stiles stands in the doorway staring at the empty other half of the room and rolls his eyes. “Yeah, happy holidays,” he mutters, before turning around and heading for the library. He can’t sleep, but maybe he can get some work done.

The library’s warm, and despite the mounting, irritable buzz that’s been under his skin for days he’s tired, and he hasn’t actually even noticed he was nodding off until he jerks awake to the sound of somebody dropping a book on the floor. It echoes through the room like a gunshot, and Stiles nearly falls out of his chair.

The girl in the next chair over, hunched down with a MacBook in her lap and gigantic headphones over her ears, gives him a look of narrow-eyed suspicion.

Stiles sighs and looks back to his tablet.

He’s made less than a paragraph’s worth of progress when he starts nodding off again, and has just about decided to give up for the evening, when something pings at the very edge of his consciousness; a feeling he’s thus far been able to describe only as long-distance static cling, a tingle against the back of his neck, though not quite so tangible.

He knows it’s Derek before the man himself appears in the lounge doorway. And then he shoves his tablet into his bag and is halfway across the room before he realizes what he’s doing, because something’s wrong. Not urgent-wrong, not imminent-death wrong, but… wrong enough that all he’s getting from Derek is  _ relief _ , wave on wave of it, like the prospect of seeing Stiles was almost  _ impossible _ until he laid eyes on him. It surges back and forth between them like a diminishing echo.

When Stiles reaches him, though, the look on his face is more embarrassed than anything else - which on Derek looks like 100% pure crankiness. People are giving him a wide berth.

“Sorry,” he says in a low voice. “I - sorry. I just--”

And even as he’s apologizing he’s reaching out, hands on Stiles’ shoulders, one sliding up around the side of his neck. Scenting him. It’s been less than a week, thinks Stiles, and usually Derek doesn’t get this twitchy over scent until it’s been at least two.

Suddenly desperate, Stiles grabs his hand and drags him out of the library.

“Won’t your roommate - what’s his name?”

“Rashid,” Stiles says, unlocking the door to his room with one hand while Derek crowds up behind him, face pressed to Stiles’ nape. 

“Won’t he mind?”

“Already gone for the holidays, Jesus  _ Christ _ will you just--” he mutters to the door, almost falling inside when the lock disengages and swings open. “Thank fuck,” he says, and hustles them inside, letting Derek kick the door shut, herd him towards the bed, peel off his hoodie.

It’s not even - it’s not about sex, Stiles realizes after a minute, as Derek pulls him down, covers him with his own body, their shoes kicked off over the edge of the mattress. Neither of them is hard, and Derek stopped at jackets, shoes and socks, though he’s got both hands shoved up under the back of Stiles’ t-shirt, his face pressed close to the side of Stiles’ neck. 

And just like that, the tension is gone, bleeding away, and Stiles feels the buzzing under his skin dissipate with a speed that leaves him exhausted.

“I thought it was just me,” he says after nearly half an hour has passed. Derek is pressed close, breathing steady and even. “Or my meds. I didn’t really sleep yesterday, or the day before that, so it wouldn’t be the first time--”

“No,” is all Derek says, soft, on an exhale.

“Something tells me you have a better idea of what’s going on than you’ve let on so far,” Stiles says eventually. It’s not exactly a question, and he’s not angry - it’s just, he’s been away at school nearly four months now, and this has been growing steadily worse. They haven’t talked about it, but neither of them is stupid - they both know this isn’t just the usual anxiety of a werewolf to make sure his pack is marked as  _ his _ , and it’s not just some combination of instinct and whatever fucked-up ramshackle functionality either or both of them has cobbled together from shitty early experiences, Stiles via denial and recklessness and Derek, more recently, with a therapist. This is something else, something almost powerful enough to feel like an independent force.

Derek lifts his face from Stiles’ neck then, regards him solemnly with his chin propped up on Stiles’ chest. Every so often Stiles is blindsided by how amazing this is, this thing where Derek touches him so easily, inhabits his space and lets Stiles into his own. Where Derek is  _ comfortable _ . This is one of those times, just for a second, and Stiles can’t help but raise a hand to Derek’s face, run fingers back through his hair.

Derek closes his eyes, leans into the touch for a minute, before he sits up, and Stiles follows until they’re sitting facing each other across the cheap bedspread. “I wasn’t sure,” Derek says eventually.

“Okay, that implies it had crossed your mind that there was something to be sure about,” Stiles prompts, when nearly a minute has gone by and Derek hasn’t said anything more.

“It’s… weird,” Derek says, hesitantly.

Stiles tilts his head to one side. “Weird by normal-person definitions or by ours?”

Derek huffs out a sigh and frowns past Stiles’ shoulder. “Weird like my dad told me about it once but I wasn’t sure if he was serious.”

Stiles keeps his mouth firmly shut for a count of twenty. Derek no longer shuts down completely when his family is mentioned, but he also rarely brings them up himself, and when he does, it’s usually his mom. Stiles can count on one hand the number of times Derek has mentioned his dad. It’s weirder, now that Stiles can remember Lucas Hale, even if it’s only a little, a child’s fuzzy, bright-edged memories. Easier  _ and  _ harder.

“Sometimes werewolves - sometimes when we’re in - in relationships… with…”

Derek looks frustrated.

“With their mates,” Stiles tries, and Derek frowns at him a little harder. Stiles grins back. They haven’t explicitly discussed their relationship status but it’s been half a year since they started sleeping in the same bed, on and off, since Stiles realized  _ he _ was the one Derek turned to when he couldn’t turn to anybody else. And it made him snort with mildly uncomfortable laughter the first few times it happened but Stiles has been referred to that way by gossipy older werewolves in the senior-citizen age range by now to assume that that was community-approved term for a committed pair. They haven’t talked about it, but it’s been  _ years  _ since Stiles could deny he and Derek were committed to each other, whatever form it took.

Like a lot of other things that have happened in the last several months, it’s weird how weird it’s  _ not. _

Derek glances up at the ceiling like he’s praying for patience, and then looks back down at their hands, where they’ve crept together across the bedspread almost unconsciously. “You know how werewolves in a pack can… sense each other.”

“Emotions,” Stiles says, nodding. “Always been useful in emergencies.” 

“And how when it’s that, but closer, we can… hear each other, kind of.” He puts a hand on Stiles’ chest, over his heart. Stiles knows it’s his imagination, but it feels like his heart beats a little harder, a little louder in response.

“And human members too, sometimes,” Stiles agrees, softly, because it took him a long time - before Aunt Pearl came and the spell was broken and his magic leveled up to where it should have been all along - to get to a place where he  _ could  _ feel that, even a little. The two-way semi-empathy of a pack, the sense of closeness and belonging, even the occasional ping of definite input from one or another of his packmates. The way that was always a little stronger with Derek, if never quite as explicit as it seemed to be for the wolves, though Stiles has always thought that was because Derek was the Alpha, was stronger than the others. “Wait, you’re saying…”

“My parents could…” Derek starts, and his voice goes a little rough in the middle, and he stops and closes his eyes, swallowing, pausing. Stiles’ hands tighten around Derek’s without his conscious direction.

“They could almost… hear each other, sometimes. Not words, but… they could feel each other. Do it on purpose, almost. Know if the other one was sad, or happy. And they could… they could always find each other.

“And my father told me that when they first met, before they were married, it was… it was hard. To be apart. That it hurt.”

“Like… withdrawal?” Stiles asks, thinking of that now-vanished buzz under his skin, the feeling like his body didn’t fit right, like something was missing. It wasn’t  _ un _ like the times he’d run out of meds, forgotten to take them. But it wasn’t exactly  _ like  _ that, either.

“Kind of, yeah. From how I’ve heard it described.”

“Described. So you don’t know?”

“It’s never happened to me before. It doesn’t happen to everyone. Most people talk about it like it’s a myth. A  _ not-real _ thing.”

“Like werewolves,” Stiles scoffs, then sobers, when Derek looks at him entreatingly. “So you’re saying it’s not… imaginary, just… really really rare.”

Derek nods, not looking up.

“What does that mean, Derek?”

“I don’t know.”

“But…” Stiles thinks about it, the disparate pieces seeming to come slowly together. “Your dad was human.”

“He was when they met, yeah.”

“So?”

“So...” Derek shrugs, frustrated.  “So wolf or human, it doesn’t seem to matter. Exposure, suitability,  _ fate _ , fuck, I don’t know. But my parents had it and I think… I think we have it.”

Stiles looks down at their tangled fingers. “It’s different from a pack bond,” he ventures, half to himself. “Different from you rubbing yourself all over me like a cat every time I come home.”

Derek blows out an irritated sigh, probably because they’ve done this before, this spiel, about a dozen times. “It’s not like that. Scenting is about safety, about… familiarity. It makes sense, if you think about it. Warning off other wolves, other creatures, marking you as… as belonging. To a pack.  And sometimes it’s about reassurance, too, about touch, about making sure nobody feels isolated or apart, and there’s other stuff but it’s not… it’s not just about the individual people involved. This… is.” Derek shuts his mouth, presses his lips together. His eyes are on their hands, too, and his chest is rising and falling just a little too fast. If Stiles were a wolf he’s sure he could hear Derek’s heart pounding.

“Would it always be this bad?” Stiles asks, squeezing down to hold Derek’s hands when he tries to jerk his hands away. Derek clenches his jaw, shakes his head.

“I think it will fade, eventually. Settle down. Or,” he hurries to add, the words tumbling over one another, “from what I’ve read, if we wanted to break it… we can do that. It would suck, but…”

“Did I say I wanted to break it?” Stiles is angry, suddenly, breathless with it, fingers gripping Derek’s wrists too tightly. If he were human it would bruise. 

“You’re eighteen years old, Stiles.” Derek’s voice is soft, gutted. 

“Yeah. An adult.”

“If we let it get there, it’s  _ permanent _ .”

“Have I, at any point since we started this, given you the impression that I was looking for anything other than permanent?” Stiles snaps, terrified for a moment that he has - that he’s somehow the one to blame for putting this doubt in Derek’s mind. But no, he realizes after a couple of seconds, as Derek looks away: no. This is just… a Derek thing. 

“Hey,” says Stiles, soft. “Der. Look at me.”

Derek swallows, looks. He looks like he’s waiting for the axe to fall, like his face the morning they told Stiles’ dad about werewolves. Expecting the blow, braced for it, sure he deserves it. One day, Stiles wants to say he’s seen this look for the last time.

“Have I?” Stiles asks, inching closer. “Answer me.”

“No,” Derek says at last, his voice small. 

“So?”

“I just…” Derek admits, almost inaudible. “I guess I just didn’t want to start believing it. In case.”

“Fuck,” Stiles says, exasperated, and lets go of Derek’s hands only long enough to climb into his lap, wrap himself around Derek, face pressed into his hair. His own heart’s pounding now, like the drop off a bridge at the top of the bungee jump. His insides feel hollow, cavernous, and so, so full. Derek surges up into him, arms pulling him in tight, face pressed to Stiles’ throat, his breath harsh against Stiles’ skin. 

“Believe it, okay?” Stiles says, voice muffled into Derek’s hair.

“Okay,” Derek says, holding him almost too tight. He’s shaking. “Okay.”


	2. The Well

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Pill bottles. Orange, innocuous. Or they would be in anybody else’s house. The sight of them makes Stiles’ stomach swoop, and he swallows, hard, before he lets himself look any closer, read the labels._
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> _Not Dad’s._

They drive back that evening, Derek at the wheel because Stiles is feeling totally bagged. Derek stops at Stiles’ house so Stiles can grab the bag of Christmas presents, stashed in the back of his bedroom closet, that he hasn’t finished wrapping yet, along with the pile of Amazon packages collecting dust in the living room that Dad was specifically forbidden to open.

He thinks about Derek while he’s dumping out his laundry bag on his bed, grabbing clean clothes from the dresser and then drops his backpack on the bed to rummage through it. The pile of readings he totally plans to finish over break but probably won’t, check. His emergency magical supplies, check. His, uh, other… supplies? He appears to have left back at school.

He pauses for a moment, considering. They’ve been going slow very deliberately, and Stiles definitely doesn’t want Derek to think he’s pushing, but. Well. Stiles also believes in being prepared.

When Stiles hit puberty his dad didn’t just sit him down for the embarrassing sex talk, he brought along Melissa and a stack of brochures. Stiles got what was probably the second-most comprehensive parent-initiated sex education of any kid in his class, after only Scott. Dad also started keeping a small Tupperware container of various supplies under the bathroom sink, “just in case.” At fourteen, Stiles swore up and down never to touch them, because that would mean Dad would  _ know _ .

Being prepared wins out over potential embarrassment. It probably won’t come up, but he picks up his laundry bag and backpack and heads for the main bathroom anyway.

It’s the work of a couple of minutes to toss the probably-unnecessary supplies into his backpack and zip it up, and he’s in a hurry, which is probably why he doesn’t notice on his way in, but does notice when he stands back up.

Pill bottles. Orange, innocuous. Or they would be in anybody else’s house. The sight of them makes Stiles’ stomach swoop, and he swallows, hard, before he lets himself look any closer, read the labels.

Not Dad’s.

He shuts his eyes, and looks again. The relief doesn’t really get a chance to take hold, because it only takes a second or two for him to process the rest of the information typed neatly under Melissa’s name.

There are two bottles. On one:  _ Recombinant interferon alfa-2b (Intron A).  _ On the other:  _ Norpramin. May cause nausea.  _

He doesn’t remember walking out of the bathroom, down the stairs, out the door. He’s pretty sure he locked the door, but if he did, it was on autopilot; mostly he’s sure Derek would have done it if he didn’t. The first thing he’s aware of is Derek’s increasingly worried-sounding repetitions of his name, and finally Derek’s hand on his knee, warm and strong, shaking gently. Stiles sits up a little straighter, shakes his head. He’s not panicking. His breathing is regular. His heart is beating normally. He’s focused on the road in front of them, tuning out Derek’s voice and the worry he’s now sure he can, actually, feel.

When Stiles doesn’t keel over and doesn’t answer five minutes later, Derek turns back to the road.

Hale House is pretty deep in the woods, but it’s not a long drive, and Stiles doesn’t really think about it but the moment the Jeep comes to a stop in the carpet of leaves in front of the house, he’s out of the car and moving.

“I just - I need to walk. By myself. Okay? Sorry.”

“Stiles!” Derek says, and it’s the third or fourth time he’s said it, Stiles knows. Stiles stops.

“Are you okay?” Derek asks, and there’s a shade of the Alpha-voice there, a question that must be answered, though he’s not asking what it sounds like. He’s asking:   _ Should I stop you? _

“No,” Stiles says, and walks into the woods.

He doesn’t look back, because he doesn’t want to see Derek’s confusion, the touch of hurt, or how hard it is for Derek not to follow. He just walks, stumbling occasionally over tree roots and underbrush but mostly finding his way through long practice. His feet know these trails, even if his mind is somewhere else right now.

_ Dad lied to me _ . Melissa throwing up after Thanksgiving dinner. Dad brushing it off, rushing her home, not meeting Stiles’ eyes. Weird pauses in conversations the last few weeks, the way Scott - god,  _ Scott knew _ . He has to have known. There’s no way he could not--

_ Cancer drugs.  _ One of them was, anyway. Norpramin is an antidepressant; he knows most of those by heart. It’s often given to patients in chemo, and  _ Jesus fucking Christ  _ how did he not see this?

He wonders if Derek knew, and that’s the thought that sets his pulse rabbiting, his face flushing. His feet carry him without direction, and it’s cold, but he doesn’t care, because he just has to keep moving so that… so that what? So that reality can’t catch up? So that he doesn’t have to go back, go into the house where everybody’s all happy and excited and sharing everything except the  _ truth _ , fuck fuck fuck fuck  _ fuck _ it’s  _ not fair _ .

He finally has to stop when he realizes it’s getting dark. He scrubs at his face with his sleeve and realizes he has no idea where the hell he is.

Or… wait. No. It’s the same spot he sleepwalked to, back in November, or near enough. The same close-leaning trees, the same strange feeling of stillness. He dreamed this place before he saw it, knows,  _ knows  _ he never set foot here before that night, and for all of that it’s still achingly, painfully familiar.

He’s breathing too hard, and he crouches down, forehead pressed hard against his knees, trying to count, trying to focus. 

He looks up, and she’s there.

At first, his eyes can’t resolve the image; she’s a shape, a shadow against the dusk-lit trees. And part of his mind denies the sight so utterly that she’s a blur at first, too. But he rubs at his eyes again, blinks hard, and the image remains. 

Mom.

He chokes out a sob before he can stop himself, but it’s just a noise, not a word. He staggers to his feet. She’s facing away from him, and as he rises she moves, raising an arm to point off through the trees, deeper into the shadows. 

_ That way. _

He has a sense that she looks back, over her shoulder, but he gets no impression of her face - just a bone-deep certainty that this is - this is  _ Mom _ , walking away, under the trees.

Stiles follows without a thought. He almost loses her twice, three times, because she’s faster than him, more certain of her footing, stepping lightly on leaf-litter and over upthrust tree roots and rotting logs. The trees that seemed too close-pressed to pass, hostile to invasion, seem to part before her, before Stiles, like they were only waiting. It seems darker than it should, darker than the canopy should allow, but he’s not afraid. Not even when he nearly falls, loses sight of her for a second, because he’s so sure of his direction now. So sure that he’s running by the time he sees the light glimmering between the thick trunks, nearly falls flat on his face when suddenly he’s through, stumbling into a clearing.

It’s the biggest tree Stiles has ever seen in real life, bigger than the redwoods they stood hand in hand to circle on a field trip to Oregon in fifth grade, bigger than the pictures of thousand-year-old old-growth trees he’s seen in books and on the Internet. It towers many storeys high, branches reaching out like the beams of a barn, or a church. It’s impossible, because how could something like this exist in their woods without him knowing about it? 

The answer comes to him all at once:  _ We aren’t supposed to know _ . Or…  _ weren’t _ .

When his gaze slides back down to earth, he sees Mom again, her back to him. She’s standing near the trunk, her hand pressed to the bark - _no_ , says his mind, _the_ _skin_ , and after that it seems obvious to step forward, to reach out, to put his hand on the trunk next to his mother’s.

It slams into him like a wave: he is everywhere, is too many places at once, and his mind can’t hold it all. It’s like the worst and most vivid of his might-have-beens after the spell was broken, but devoid his own tinges of regret and longing. It’s an ocean coursing through him in a second, and he’s not ready.

In the last second before it takes him down, he feels the same warmth and welcome he felt that night in the woods, feels a strange, vast touch of regret, sees his mother’s smiling face.

He’s not afraid.

***

He wakes up to a hard, electric spike of pain. 

“Ow, fuck!” he says, bolting up, or trying to. Strong hands grasp his shoulders and keep him from going over sideways as he sits up all at once. 

“Language,” Aunt Pearl says mildly, hands tight on his upper arms. The pain resolves, now, a dull throb in his right shoulder where Aunt Pearl gave his trapezius a mighty pinch. Her face is calm, but her eyes are… not. She’s studying him carefully, eyes darting all over his face. 

“Ow,” Stiles complains again, relaxing a little. She flicks him in the ear, apparently having decided he’s not injured. 

“Don’t frighten an old woman like that,” she says, hands squeezing, for a second, viciously tight. “I drive up and your wolf is pacing a rut in the driveway, putting off worry like a fog, and I find out you’ve  _ run off into the woods _ without a word?”

“I’m sorry,” Stiles says immediately, suddenly feeling twice as bad about the way he left Derek. “I didn’t think--”

“Apparently not,” Aunt Pearl says sharply, but releases him, covering her mouth with one hand. She takes a deep breath, eyes closed for a moment, before settling back on her knees, hands in her lap.

“I just managed to convince him not to follow you,” she says, a little more evenly, “and only because I sensed nothing untoward out here. Lucky he believed me,” she adds, “or you’d have your whole pack out here looking for you for the second time in a month.”

Stiles looks at her out of the corner of his eye. “You heard about that, huh?”

“I hear everything,” she says, crossing her arms in a way that suggests  _ and don’t you dare ever think otherwise. _

Stiles takes stock of himself then, now that the throbbing has faded. He seems in one piece, though his back is damp from the ground. 

“What happened?” he asks, because what he remembers doesn’t make much sense.

“Looks like you hyperventilated,” says Aunt Pearl, unusually gently, brushing leaves and pine needles off the back of his jacket as she helps him to his feet. 

“But I wasn’t--” Oh. Stiles does remember thinking, very firmly, that he wasn’t having a panic attack. It wouldn’t be the first time he was wrong.

But that’s not all he remembers. “I saw Mom,” he says, and Aunt Pearl’s head snaps up, eyes bright and hard on his face.

Stiles flinches back, but looks around. He’s back where they found him, near the thickening trees but not among them. It suggests Aunt Pearl’s right and he dreamed it. It wouldn’t be the first time he imagined something in the midst of a panic attack. But then again, what does dreaming even mean, anymore?

“Here?” she asks, surprising him. “Out here?” Her expression is keen, rather than skeptical. Thoughtful.

“I followed her,” Stiles tells her. He shrugs. “At least, I think I did.”

Aunt Pearl turns her head to stare, unerringly, at the dark place under the trees. It’s the same place that radiated welcome, not that long ago, that still feels more familiar and inviting than dark and scary.

“I think,” he says at last, taking a deep breath and releasing it, “I think I can show you.”

She turns back to him, eyes narrow. “Do you now?”

He shrugs again. “I think… I think I’ve been doing it by accident, with Derek, for weeks now. Bad dreams, mostly. He catches the edges. Not… anything concrete, but...“ Stiles squirms under his jacket, like he can shake the sensation away. “Feelings.”

Aunt Pearl’s chin comes up. “You’ve been keeping things from your old auntie, smart boy,” she says slowly. She cups his cheek with one weathered hand, and something about her smile makes him blush. “But I understand why.”

_ How the  _ hell  _ can she  _ know, Stiles wonders, but now is not the time.

She leads them over to a convenient fallen log and they sit down, knees touching. They’ve done this so many times by now that it’s habit: her dry, strong hands in his, letting himself fall down, down, down, into the dark of the other-place; reaching out a second time, there, deep beneath the world.

_ It’s stranger this time, because he isn’t himself. He’s there, but feels like a passenger in his own body, and when he turns his head, Aunt Pearl is there, standing just a few paces back. _

_ “I just… ended up here,” he tells her, trying not to feel unsettled by the way this feels like the cut-scene in a video game, out of his control. But it is, he reminds himself. This already happened, and all they can do is watch. _

_ “For the second time,” Aunt Pearl says, thoughtfully, and then goes stiff all over, eyes focused over his head. Stiles turns, and Mom is there. _

_ She looks different this time; less substantial, but still recognizable in some certain, bone-deep way he doesn’t know how to explain. Aunt Pearl steps forward, stands beside him, and he sees her mouthing a name, Mom’s real name, her eyes wet and her mouth hard. _

_ Mom walks away, and just like before, they follow. _

_ The walk into the trees seems to take no time at all this time, and what Stiles notices is Aunt Pearl’s face, again, as they stand at the edge of the clearing, impossible moonlight pouring down on them. He’s never in his life seen her so unguarded, but the surprise, the amazement on her face makes her look like the pictures he’s seen in family photo albums - thirty years younger and absent the weight of three decades of work and pain. When Stiles steps forward to lay his hand next to Mom’s, he hears Aunt Pearl gasp, turns his head to see her clutching at her chest, tears streaking her face. _

When he opens his eyes, the tears are real.

“Are you okay?” he asks, because this is bordering on surreal. He pats his jacket down until he finds the packet of tissues in his pocket, jumps when she snatches it out of his hand and dabs at her cheeks, face downturned. 

“How long have you been able to do that?” she asks eventually, and okay, apparently they’re pretending that didn’t happen.

Stiles shrugs. “That’s the first time I’ve done it on purpose.”

She hands back the packet of tissues, tucks away the one she’s been using, and considers him. He long ago stopped being intimidated when she does this, looks at him like she can see inside his head, but it’s still a lot to bear for more than a few seconds, even for him. 

“Once,” she says eventually, “when you were very small - oh, four or five years old, I suppose - you came running downstairs one morning and said you’d had a dream about somebody breaking into the house.”

He’s heard this story before, and he smiles. Dad liked to tell it to the new deputies, way back when.

“But when you told the story - and you always told your dreams like a story, every morning, and with a good deal more detail than any other child I’d ever known, wouldn’t eat breakfast until it was done, which drove your father crazy, especially when he was just home from a night shift, like he was that day.”

“We were always late,” Stiles remembers.

Aunt Pearl nods, with a tiny smile. “You were insistent. Not afraid, as I’m sure to you it was like any other dream, but the more you told, the less entertained your father became. The house in your dream, you see, wasn’t yours, but the one across the street. After breakfast John took me aside and told me someone had broken in the night before, taken a laptop and a fistful of family heirlooms. They couldn’t figure out how he’d gotten in; he’d left no trace. And  _ then  _ you told him,” and here Aunt Pearl started to chuckle, “that he’d climbed ‘up the roses,’ meaning the trellis, and dropped his bag on the way back down, spilled out everything in the bushes at the bottom. That he’d ‘said a bad word,’ which you apparently thought was hilarious.”

Stiles grins now, remembering his dad’s face.

“Your father went back that afternoon with another deputy and searched the backyard again. And in the mud below the window they found half the missing jewelry and the burglar’s wallet tramped down under the rose bushes.”

“Dad got a commendation,” Stiles remembers.

“And spent the next six months telling anyone who’d listen what a good eyewitness his son was, all of five and already busting crooks.”

Stiles keeps smiling, though there’s a spike of sadness there, too. For a long time, he wanted to be a cop. For a long time, Dad was proud of that.

“I don’t know if he really thought you’d seen,” Aunt Pearl goes on. “Or if his mind just glossed over the important detail that the trellis was on the side of the house opposite yours. That there was no way you could have  _ seen _ . At least not in the traditional sense.”

Stiles feels his mouth drop open. Somehow in all this time he’s never really realized-- “The spell?”

Aunt Pearl gives a one-shouldered shrug. “Maybe. People are pretty good about not thinking about things that don’t make sense. Not noticing.”

Stiles stares down at his hands. He was, too, for a long time. 

“But that morning,” Aunt Pearl goes on, “it was early, I wasn’t minding myself, and you found me first. Grabbed my hand with both of yours, and I -- saw.”

“You--” Stiles gapes at her. “You mean I--”

“It wasn’t the only time,” she says, “but by the time  you were nine or ten, well. You know.”

Stiles swallows back the accustomed surge of regret: by the time he was diagnosed. By the time he was on his meds. By the time that and the spell and  _ life  _ and…

“Your Baba could do it, I think,” Aunt Pearl tells him, hands folded in her lap. “When we were young, at least - I never had the knack, myself. It’s always easier in the other direction.”

Stiles barely remembers Baba Dasha; she’s mostly the memory of a big body, hands heavy with rings, and a cloud of lavender scent. But as Aunt Pearl says it, it feels right.

“So what does this mean?” he asks, waving vaguely in the direction of the trees. “Is it the future? The past? Or just one of my…”

“Hmm,” says Aunt Pearl, rubbing a hand across her mouth. “It’s hard to say. These woods have always been… not strange, but… powerful. A deep well.”

The last three words are intoned rather than spoken, like she’s reciting from somewhere, and indeed, she looks surprised, sits up straight.

“What is it?” Stiles asks, reaching for her, but she waves him away and gets to her feet, taking two, three steps towards the edge of where the forest seems to loom.

“I’m not sure.” She stretches out one hand, briefly, fingers splayed. She drops it to her side after only a second. “I’ve walked these woods often, or I once did. But I have no memory of having felt anything like this. Do you?” She looks at him over her shoulder, and he stands to join her. 

“No,” he admits. “It feels… new. Sort of. But how could it be?”

“How could something powerful enough to hide so well have gone unnoticed all this time?” Aunt Pearl says, voicing what he’s been unable to put into order all these weeks. “And all the same... I see what you meant, now.” Her eyes drift closed, like she’s listening to something just out of earshot. “It’s so deep under everything that it’s  _ within the bounds  _ of your wards. Like it was here all along. Is this what you felt?”

“I think so,” Stiles says, wrapping his arms around himself. Standing here now, with Aunt Pearl at his side, there’s no denying that the presence he felt, the call and the pull, were coming from here. Or… very nearby. 

“But if it wants us here,” Stiles asks, trying not to get caught up in the currents around them, which seem to be growing stronger by the minute, “then why don’t I want to walk in there right now? Why does it feel so…” Wrong. It’s a gentle negation, but it’s there.

“If it’s what I think,” Aunt Pearl says softly, face turned towards the trees, “we’re not meant to, just yet.”

She takes a step forward, reaches out to touch a tree just before the place where the dimness starts; on a worn-smooth section of bark, he sees it, carved deep and stark beneath her fingers: mistletoe, the rough outline of berries and leaves. 

Their mark. Mom’s mark. These days it’s as familiar as the backs of his own hands.

***

The house is dark and quiet when they get back, and Aunt Pearl gives him a clap on the back and goes to find her own bed without another word. Stiles creeps up the stairs, knowing there’s no way everybody’s just gone quietly to bed this early; it’s barely midnight. And yes - halfway up, he hears the soft murmur of voices off to his left; the kitchen door is closed, but he can hear three or four people in there, gets the faint smell of burning sugar. But Derek, he knows somehow, is not among them. He stands on the stairs, frozen with indecision, for nearly a minute, the lights on the Christmas tree blurring below him.

The master bedroom door is closed, but there’s a sliver of light beneath. Stiles presses his forehead to the door, takes a deep breath, and pushes it open.

Derek is sitting up in bed, his hair a mess, a book in his lap. He’s not asleep, not completely, but his eyes are closed - they open, slowly, as Stiles closes the door softly behind him.

“Hey,” he says, sitting up a little more and putting the book aside. It’s Stiles’ copy of  _ The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,  _ the one whose dust jacket is long gone, the top corner of the front cover bent out of shape. Stiles sags back against the door.

“Hey.”

Derek’s entire body radiates  _ careful, careful _ , and at another time Stiles might find that irritating but right now it’s just a comfort, as much as he usually hates Derek holding himself back for other people. 

Stiles doesn’t really think about it - is toeing off his shoes and shrugging out of jacket and jeans and crawling up the bed before he really knows what he’s doing, right into Derek’s open arms.

It’s quiet for a long time, Derek nosing against his hair, hand stroking slowly up and down Stiles’ back.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Stiles says eventually, and he feels Derek sigh.

“Okay.”

It’s so easy, so accepting, that Stiles looks up a little suspiciously. Derek’s been getting very into the talking about things… thing. Probably all the therapy. It looks good on him, though.

“You really like talking,” Derek says, over-serious. “I figure you’ll get around to it eventually.”

Stiles laughs, buries his face against Derek’s shoulder. “I hate you,” he mumbles.

“Sure you do,” Derek says easily.

There’s another long quiet, punctuated only by the occasional faint, distant thud from elsewhere in the house. Werewolves are always so much louder when they’re trying to be quiet, Stiles has found.

At length, Stiles asks: “Are they asleep?” He’s not sure how long they’ve been lying here, close and warm, the yellow of the bedside lamp the only light.

Derek tips his head a little, concentrating. “Mostly,” he says, and then looks at Stiles curiously for all of two seconds before Stiles kisses him.

It clearly takes Derek by surprise, but he rallies quickly, arms tightening around Stiles’ body. “Mmf,” says Derek, immediately pulling Stiles closer, into Derek’s lap.

“Stiles,” he tries to say, breaking away for a second, but dips his head down only a second later, pressing his face into Stiles’ throat, mouth open and wet against the skin and Stiles makes a noise that is nothing like language as Derek hooks a hand behind Stiles’ knee and pulls, pressing them closer together.

It quivers on the edge of  _ go-go-go _ for a second, like someone has his hand on the lever and at any moment it could tick over into  _ right now _ , but instead… it doesn’t. Stiles is hard, is breathing fast, can feel Derek’s hips under him, pushing up, but then they’re not. They’re pressed close enough he can feel Derek’s heart pounding, can feel his hot, damp breath against Stiles’ throat, but it’s melting away, becoming diffuse, and they let it. Derek’s mouthing against the side of his neck becomes nuzzling, becomes a long, slow breath in and out, and Derek’s arms slide around his waist, his bare arms pressed to the skin at the small of Stiles’ back where his shirt has ridden up.

It takes Stiles a few seconds longer to come down, but when he does, he’s uncertain. “I… sorry,” he says in a whisper, and Derek makes a protesting noise.

“It’s okay,” he says, and it sounds,  _ feels _ , like the truth, but…

“I didn’t ask,” Stiles says, and he feels like he should pull away, but he can’t make his hands let go of Derek’s t-shirt. “We said--”

“Stiles.” And Derek pulls back just enough to look him in the eye. “It’s okay.” And he’s the Alpha for a second as much as he’s Derek, and Stiles believes him. And then his eyes are darting down and he says “I’ve been thinking about it, too,” and he’s all Derek, all here with Stiles.

“Really?” Stiles’ voice is a whisper. “Thinking about - what kind of thinking?”

Derek sighs, looks at him like he’s an idiot, and Stiles grins. “Because I’ve been thinking about you, you know,” he shrugs, despite the heat in his face, and he’s going to say it, something like  _ holding me down _ , or  _ fingers _ , or any one of a dozen true and extremely detailed fantasies - the fantasies of a virgin with an active and detail-oriented imagination - that he’s been having for  _ months _ , but Derek’s eyes widen and Stiles realizes oh,  _ shit _ .

“I,” Derek swallows, hard. “I think I could… do that.”

Stiles stares at him, heart pounding. “I’m-- I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to--”

Derek is still staring at him, eyes wide, but his hands are steady, coming to rest at Stiles’ hip and the nape of his neck. “Stiles,” he says, and his voice is just as calm, “calm down. It’s okay. You were…” He smiles, just one corner of his mouth, just a little bit smug. “All worked up. And you were upset.”

Stiles moans in abject humiliation, lets his head fall back. “I am such an asshole, I’m so sorry--”

“It’s okay,” Derek says again, but he looks interested. “How long have you been able to--”

Stiles sighs, sagging forward. “A while?” he guesses. “That’s only the second time I’ve done it and known I’d done it. I think I was… by accident. For a couple of months.”

Derek’s eyebrows go up, and then he nods, like that makes sense. “That time I called you,” he says slowly. “And your dreams.”

“My dreams,” Stiles agrees, sourly. “I’m sorry,” he says, for the umpteenth time, but Derek only shakes his head.

“I guess it’s better than the nightmares,” Stiles says, and Derek laughs, and then Stiles gets an idea.

“Do you remember,” he says slowly, “right after we broke the spell - when you asked me what I’d seen?”

“About your... might-have-beens,” Derek says, brows lowering, but he looks curious rather than upset.

_ The rush of names and faces, people he’d barely known and forgotten. A world that had never known overwhelming shadow. A table full of family, Derek’s sisters and brother and cousins and Mom and Dad happy and smiling, and Derek. Derek and Stiles. “I’ve always known you.” _

“I think I could… show you one. Maybe. If you wanted.”

Most of the might-have-beens come and go like frames in a zoetrope, but there are some he comes back to, time and time again, hoards like marbles. Most of the ones he remembers are happy ones, but even so, offering this seems as wildly unwise as it does absolutely necessary.

Derek’s eyes are wide, and Stiles expects any number of denials, of gentle refusals, but he does not expect what Derek actually says, which is a relatively quick “are you sure?” 

Exactly what Stiles asked him, all those months ago, when Derek asked him to tell him what he’d seen.

It’s not disgust in Derek’s face, as he might have feared - and would have been absolutely reasonable. This feels dangerous, but there’s as much hunger in Derek’s eyes as there is fear. 

Stiles lets out a breath, presses their foreheads together, and shows him something happy.

_ The first time Stiles is allowed to join them for the full moon, he’s five and a half. Derek is nine, all arms and legs, and takes the responsibility of watching Stiles very seriously, holding firmly to his hand. Laura laughs at him.  _

_ “I’d rather run, anyway,” she tells Derek, though Stiles heard Ms. Talia tell her not to let Graham out of sight. She looks at Stiles with a grin. “No offense, squirt.”  _

_ Stiles is too excited to take offense, bouncing on his toes. “I can run!” he says. _

_ “Sure you can, Baby,” says Mom, coming up behind them to ruffle his hair and Derek’s, too. Derek tolerates it for three whole seconds before ducking away. “Just be careful. Remember you can’t see as well in the dark as Derek can. And Derek, you remember--” _

_ “I won’t let him fall behind,” Derek says, fingers tight around Stiles’ hand. “I promise.” _

_ “Good boy,” says Mom, as Ms. Talia appears, except she’s a wolf tonight. As always, Stiles stares, eyes wide with admiration. _

_ “I’ll be a wolf one day,” Laura pronounces, from where she’s standing nearby. _

_ “Will you be able to do that?” Stiles whispers to Derek, who is grinning at the big black wolf as she nudges Mom with her nose, shoves into Luke with her shoulder, prances back, mouth open in a wolfy grin. _

_ “I hope so,” says Derek, before Talia-the-wolf raises her head and lets out a howl, and then the chase is on. _

_ The first rush is like a race, with everyone pelting for the treeline. Stiles feels his feet push against the ground, sees the glow of the reflective strips on Mom’s running shoes, feels the sweaty grip of Derek’s palm, and then they’re under the trees. Talia howls again, and the other wolves answer, even Derek. Stiles just tries to keep up, but it’s not a trial; he’s caught up in the run, the moon bright overhead making it easy to place his feet. He laughs aloud, and Derek grins at him, mouth full of sharp teeth and eyes glowing gold. _

_ He feels like he could run forever. _

When he opens his eyes, Derek’s are still closed, and there are tears leaking down his cheeks. Stiles is horrified, wiping away the tears with frantic hands even as he struggles up out of the pleasant drift of the memory. “Oh, fuck, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have--”

But Derek opens his eyes, stills Stiles’ hands, and he’s  _ smiling _ .

“Thank you,” he says, and his voice is strange, wobbly. He kisses Stiles, hard enough to hurt. “Thank you,” he says again. Derek’s face is soft, open, raw. He pulls them down onto the bed, and it’s okay,  _ it’s okay _ , because all Stiles can feel through the bond is regret, gratitude, all mixed up together and inextricable.

That night, he doesn’t dream at all.

***

According to family legend, Mom came up with his nickname while still in the delivery room.

It wasn’t a big deal - most of the medical staff didn’t want to try and pronounce his real first name anyway, so when Sarah Stilinski started calling him “Stiles” while absently counting his fingers and toes, they went along with it. 

Kind of like how nobody ever questioned the initial “C” on Sarah’s medical bracelet.

He hasn’t asked Aunt Pearl about it, but he does know that “Pearl” isn’t her first name, either; that Mom was her namesake. He’s not sure why he never noticed before, that plenty of people knew Mom’s first name was Claudia but never called her that, how the whole pack knew his real first name but never, ever used it-- it never occurred to him it might be an other-thing. A magic thing.

He does know that in a few spells, a few rituals, it doesn’t work if he introduces himself as Stiles. 

It’s his real name he whispers as he goes around the house touching his fingertips to the windowsills, refreshing the charms out of habit before the sun is all the way up. The house is quiet this early, and he can stand at the French doors in the living room, the ones that look out over the back yard and out into the woods, undisturbed. He left Derek sleeping, curled towards the tangle of covers Stiles had been occupying, and Derek, when left to his own devices, is not exactly a morning person. At the edge of awareness Stiles can feel Aunt Pearl, Allison and Scott, who all slept here last night, and further out, the rest of the pack, in their own homes. Less brightly, more distantly, he can feel Dad. Melissa.

Stiles shuts his eyes and lets his head fall forward, the glass cold against his forehead. He can feel Derek come slowly awake above him, and eventually hears him coming softly down the stairs, trying to be quiet. By the time he comes into the living room Stiles is straightening up, heading for the kitchen, and Derek comes up behind him without a word, loops arms around his waist, rubs his face in Stiles’ hair as he starts the coffee, distracting himself. Stiles leans back, accepting the comfort, grateful for the lack of questions, and lets time slip away.

That’s where they are when Aunt Pearl comes down a while later: folded up in each other and still. Stiles only glances at her face, feels his own cheeks go hot, but makes no move to extract himself from Derek even though Derek tightens his arms, presses his face closer like he expects Stiles to try to escape. 

Aunt Pearl says nothing. Just smiles, small and private and - the bonds between her and the pack are tenuous, still young, but present - a little sad. She takes three mugs down from the cupboard and lines them up on the counter, the smile becoming a smirk as she fills them all, sets the coffee pot back on its burner.

Predictably, it’s Stiles who eventually breaks. “What?” he asks, as she nudges two mugs in their direction and takes a sip from her own, as the sadness gives way under amusement.

“Came upon your parents just like that, once,” she says, smile hidden behind her mug. Stiles starts to smile back, but then she snorts, turning to head back out into the living room. “‘Course, they were wearing a lot less clothing at the time.”

Stiles chokes even as Derek muffles a laugh against Stiles’ shoulder, and now Stiles really does try to get loose, slapping at Derek’s arms - a useless proposition, given Derek’s strength. “That’s not funny!” he calls after Aunt Pearl, indignant, but Derek just giggles helplessly into Stiles’ shoulder, and holds on.

***

Despite the early-morning ribbing, Aunt Pearl is a champ for the rest of the week, running interference any time Dad or Melissa are mentioned. He’s not sure if she knows, or if it’s just instinct - she also engineers a seamless topic change any time anyone so much as mentions his and Derek’s noticeably increased PDA or Stiles’ November sleepwalk into the woods. Either way, he’s grateful. It allows him to almost enjoy some of his holiday. He exchanges brief texts with Dad once, when he gets out of meeting him for lunch by pleading a magic lesson (not even a lie). Dad’s working Christmas, the way he has every year since he became Sheriff so that his deputies can spend the holiday with their families. He doesn’t even see them until evening on Christmas Day.

It can’t be avoided forever, though. By early evening dinner is made, everyone has arrived or is arriving and abuzz with conversation. Dad finds him in the kitchen and wraps him up in a hug that Stiles returns mostly out of habit. Dad doesn’t seem to notice, though, just starts making the gravy (he doesn’t trust anyone else to make it without lumps), allowing Stiles to escape to the living room where Lydia and Erica are arguing over whether the centrepiece Dad brought along (made by adorable local elementary school children and gifted to the station) can stay on the table or whether it will get in the way of the food.

Stiles crams a handful of crackers into his mouth and declines to offer an opinion, his knee jogging up and down until Derek stops by on his way into the kitchen with an armful of serving platters to rub his face along Stiles’ cheek. Scott, Allison, Erica and Lydia notice, and burst out laughing when Derek carries on without noticing Stiles’ blush.

It’s a distraction, at least.

So is dinner. Food is not only the great peacemaker but a great way to focus - getting bites of turkey and potato and green bean from plate to mouth occupies all of his narrowly-focused attention for nearly an hour.

And then Melissa has to excuse herself for a minute. She doesn’t quite run to the bathroom, but it’s enough of an upset that everyone notices, this time. Everybody goes quiet, the wolves at the table frozen in listening poses, and when they start to look at each other with concern Stiles realizes they’re listening to Melissa throw up, in the bathroom down the hall. Stiles puts down his knife and fork, the delicious food becoming a leaden weight in his stomach. Across the table, Dad meets his eyes and he looks  _ guilty _ , tired.

Stiles looks away. Sometimes he wishes he wasn’t so good at figuring things out.

His appetite is entirely gone by the time Melissa reappears, and she stops before sitting, looking around at all of them. “Well,” she says wryly, looking at Dad, who takes her reaching hand in his as she sits down, “I guess now’s as good a time as any.”

Stiles bites his tongue - harder than he meant to, and the taste of copper floods his mouth. But at least the taste of blood is something he already associates with this feeling, like everything’s about to drop out from underneath him.

He hears everything she says next but the words mostly wash over him, like he’s listening to a recording or a voice addressing someone out of sight, through a door. Malignant melanoma. An excision, about a year ago. She didn’t tell anyone that time - she pauses to apologize to Scott, who looks stricken, darting glances from his mom to... to Stiles, at the other end of the table - because it seemed to be gone. A recurrence more recently, confirmed only a few months ago, while they were all away at school. She’s on medication, which sometimes causes nausea (Stiles closes his eyes, fiercely ignores Derek’s concerned gaze against the side of his face, ignores Dad’s attention on him from across the table). She hasn’t told them before now because (and here Stiles can feel her attention zero in on him, too, resents it like hardly anything else, hates himself for the resentment) it seemed like it was handled, but now she’s going in for another surgery.

“I’ll be in the hospital a few days. I wanted you kids to know because I’m not sure when it’ll happen; I’m getting called in as soon as Dr. Tam is available, so it might be while you’re all home.” She pats Scott’s hand where it’s resting on her forearm. “I didn’t want to take you by surprise.”

“Are you--” Scott’s voice is small, but willing to be reassured, “are you going to be--” There’s another pause, and in his imagination Scott can hear Scott asking the same question, years ago, under the covers in Stiles’ bedroom.  _ Is she going to be… you know… okay? _ Because back then the idea of a grown-up dying was foreign, impossible.

“I will probably be fine,” Melissa says, firmly. As close as she’s willing to get to a definite  _ yes _ . She looks around the table at the rest of them, all calm professional. Stiles wants to find it comforting but he stopped really believing this particular brand of medical confidence when he was eleven. “I want you all to know that while this is serious, there’s no reason to panic. It’s a routine surgery, and the remission rate for this particular kind of cancer is encouragingly high.”

Stiles lets out a breath that wants to be a furious shout, slowly and carefully like cracking the cap on a soda bottle to let the carbon dioxide run out, but the feeling isn’t going anywhere. It’s persistent, building, rolling, like gravity weakening. He clenches his fists in his lap like he can stop it, keep it contained.

Gradually they move on, talking about other things, but Stiles can’t move. He just sits there, breathing, focusing on the table, on the plate in front of him, breathing. Counting. He can’t possibly be hiding it well, but the others are distracted, and it takes even Derek a while to react. He turns away from the others, the conversation about hot chocolate vs. hot toddies, looks into Stiles’ face, puts a hand on his knee. 

Stiles can’t even imagine what Derek must be picking up, but he flinches away from the touch on reflex, and that seems to be what gets through to the others, their attention fizzing along the pack bonds, chilling him to the bone. He jerks to his feet on autopilot, legs stiff as he walks away - out of the dining room, down the hall,  _ away _ .

He hears the murmurs start up, the squeak of many chairs moving, hears Derek’s firm “stay” as Derek follows him, out the door, out into the cold.

“Did you know?” Stiles asks as soon as Derek closes the door behind them. And oh, this is better - he’s angry. It’s easier than the jitter of panic, the chasm of violent terror that was looming under him as he sat at the table, deep and dark and howling.

“No,” Derek says at once. “No, I didn’t know.”

“But you knew  _ something _ ,” Stiles presses, hands in fists at his sides. “You knew something was wrong. You  _ always know. _ ”

“I knew she’d been taking medicine,” Derek says, honestly, which means all the wolves knew  _ something _ . “I knew she wasn’t feeling well, sometimes. But she always smells like hospital, and she wasn’t… distressed.” He shrugs. “She wasn’t afraid. Stiles, she obviously didn’t want anyone to--”

“Dad knew,” and Stiles can hear his own voice, can hear the accusation in it even though it makes  _ no sense _ \- Dad is inside the house and can’t hear him, but Derek is here. “Dad lied to me about it at Thanksgiving, lied right to my face. And Scott--” Scott didn’t seem surprised, exactly - worried, but his attention more on Stiles than his mother, like he’d clocked Stiles’ reaction  _ exactly,  _ was just waiting for it. But then, Scott has always believed people who told him things would work out. He doesn’t  _ know _ .

“Stiles, you heard them, the same as me,” Derek says, and he’s so infuriatingly patient. “It was minor and they didn’t want to worry anyone until there was a reason to--”

“Me. They didn’t want to tell  _ me _ ,” Stiles says, interrupting him, angry again, sees the teacher’s face, the other kids, the day he lost it in class in fifth grade: kicked a chair across the floor, ripped paintings down off the wall, smashed a vase. Their wide eyes, like he was something dangerous and unpredictable and pitiable and he  _ hates it. _ “Fragile, unstable--”  _ A liability _ .  _ Selfish. _

“Hey,  _ stop. _ ” Derek is firm, suddenly, one hand tight and careful around Stiles’ wrist. He ducks his head until Stiles has to meet his eyes. “Stop it. That’s not fair. It’s not true. You know it’s not. They love you.” Not breaking eye contact, Derek reaches for the other hand. “They’re worried about you,” he adds, more gently, head tipped a little to the side like he’s listening to the others, back inside the house. Stiles can only imagine what they’re saying, and he feels like a monster, because fuck,  _ fuck _ , this can’t be about him. He wrenches his hands out of Derek’s grip.

“They shouldn’t be,” he says, heading for the Jeep. 

Derek doesn’t try to stop him, just stands there, face unreadable, and all Stiles gets from him is sadness - though at least it isn’t pity, thank god. Stiles turns the key, puts the car into gear, and tries not to feel it, or feel the others, further away, worrying and confused.

Finally Derek is too far away to make out in the rearview, and the others are distant enough that he can shut them out, as much as it hurts. Hale House recedes into the dark.

He doesn’t go back.

***

He has his first definite hallucination not even a week into the new year.

He hasn’t been sleeping, which at first is how he writes it off; it’s just one more thing among the litany of things he’s not dealing with; Melissa, the pack, the ever-present buzzing at the back of his head, the actual buzzing of his phone as he hits  _ ignore, ignore, ignore _ ... the gap in the world that is Derek. Not that it doesn’t freak him out - the back of someone’s head sighted through a crowd: familiar, making his stomach pitch with instinctive terror - but he’s cognizant enough that he thinks no, it’s just a coincidence. The set of the shoulders is similar, but not the same. When he turns to look directly, whoever it is is gone.

But it happens again not much later, and this time it’s not  _ just  _ his imagination, and he can’t stop the instinctive flinch, the intake of breath - beside him, Gerda stops, stares, looks worried.

“What? Wh-- Stiles, what’s the matter?” And Stiles forcibly gets a hold of himself, wondering what kind of scent spike she just got off him to look that freaked-out, and tells himself that that definitely, absolutely is not Gerard Argent standing by the big tree across the courtyard, staring at him.

“It’s nothing,” he says, sounding like a liar, and clamps it down, eyes tightly shut. He gives his head a little shake. When he opens his eyes again, the vision is gone.

Gerda is still staring at him, eyes narrowed, but lets it go.

It’s not the last time. It’s not constant, but he sees Gerard twice more - standing behind his professor in Intro Crim and in the cafeteria line. He sees Peter leaning against a dorm building as they’re coming back from the coffee shop one evening - that time he’s different, smiling and sane and unhaunted, which is somehow more disturbing than anything. 

Gerda’s with him that time, and he can’t hide his reaction, his pounding heart, the way he freezes like a terrified prey animal praying not to be seen. She hauls him over to a low wall and makes him sit with his head between his knees for ten minutes before she’ll let him move, threatens to call his dad, to call his Alpha, until he dissuades her.

“I haven’t been sleeping well lately,” he says, turning, at last, to look into her eyes, trying to radiate honesty and sincerity. “It caught up with me. That’s all.”

She regards him with hard-eyed skepticism for maybe ten more seconds, but mercifully lets the lie pass.

He should tell someone, he thinks. He should tell Aunt Pearl, at least; figure out what his seeing dead people means for his growing powers. But he doesn’t.

He sees Peter again, outside his dorm, eyes glinting red in the shadows. That night he has a real dream, a normal dream, reliving the first time they killed Peter, his screams as he burned in the dark.

He wakes up sweating and gasping, his phone ringing. It’s Derek.

Instead of answering, Stiles pulls the covers over his head.

***

They find the kid half-frozen in a courtyard a week and a half into January. It’s in real papers, off-campus: freshman student, drugs believed to be involved, apparently on his way back from a club, suffering hypothermia, comatose. Stiles misses the first round of rumours sweeping the campus due to exhaustion and hallucinations and actual legitimate schoolwork but Gerda tracks him down in the coffee shop and slaps a newspaper down in front of him.

“Read,” she says, sitting down across from him with her hands curled around a coffee mug. 

Stiles blinks at her, half awake, but sits up enough to read the article. It wakes him up pretty fast, because between the niggling similarities he remembers from their earlier conversation and the way Gerda is practically vibrating in her chair, the connections are obvious.

“Any credible rumours with information beyond what’s in the article?” Stiles asks, sitting up a little straighter and reaching for his own coffee - making a face when he realizes it’s cold. How long was he sitting here staring into space, anyway?

“Nothing in the rumours,” Gerda says, shaking her head. She drags a hand through her hair - purple polish, today, with green sparkles. Perfect, as usual. “Most people didn’t hear about it, apart from this and what’s in the campus paper, and it’s talking about the ‘drugs’ more than the kid. But I know something else for sure,” she goes on, as Stiles notices how tired she looks, how… not frail, exactly, but run-down. Which means she’s barely slept, because while mers don’t have quite the healing abilities werewolves do, most shifters don’t show sleep deprivation like humans - the shift takes care of it, in the short-term, and he knows mers have to hydrate pretty thoroughly at least every couple of days. 

“There was a club crawl that night.”

Stiles looks up from the paper again, into her face, his eyes wide. “Don’t tell me. LGBTQA?”

Gerda nods, mouth set in a grim line. “And you know who never misses a club crawl.”

Stiles nods. He hates himself a little for it, but he’s genuinely grateful to have something he can  _ do _ , rather than spin in endless circles of self-loathing and recrimination and worry like he’s been doing. This is something that maybe he can  _ fix _ .

Maybe. 

***

It’s harder to creep on campus than in Beacon Hills, Stiles realizes after a few days of trying to track Andrew’s movements. At home, he knows all the places where people don’t pay much attention, places to sit and stand without drawing notice. The routines are different here, and Andrew is twitchy and on his guard, for all that he appears to be acting mostly normal. He gets coffee - at a different coffee shop than the one Stiles and Gerda saw him in that day - and he goes to class and he goes to the dining hall and he goes home. Sometimes he detours to the library, or attends club meetings where the few people Stiles still keeps up with socially say he flirts with anyone and everyone with varying levels of sincerity.

Maya, the club president, shrugs when Stiles asks her, having co-incidentally encountered her in the dining hall line and talked his way around to Andrew’s behaviour at the meetings - Stiles no longer attends; he didn’t want to risk disrupting Andrew’s patterns. “Mostly he just hits on every dude present and acts like an entitled dick,” Maya says dismissively. “Same as usual.”

“Figures,” Stiles says, with genuine disgust. “You’d think after what happened to that kid on the last club crawl--”

“Ugh,” Maya says, with a en elaborate shiver. “That was scary. Andrew danced with him - Javier - but that’s also true of like, five other guys. Probably thinks it has nothing to do with him. Anyway, I think he’d already left with somebody else by then - at least, I hadn’t seen him for hours when we all finally left, even though everybody’s supposed to check in if they’re leaving.”

“Scary, yeah,” Stiles agrees, seeing his in. “That somebody can just… disappear, like that. The newspaper said he just vanished and nobody knew what happened between the club and him being found…”

Maya shrugs again, now a little uncomfortable. “We try to keep track of freshmen, you know, but obviously the focus is more on girls. Making sure nobody tries anything. Not that that’s not, like,  _ an issue _ for boys, but. You know. It’s not the same.”

“No, it’s not. Hey, I’m not blaming you,” Stiles assures her, touching her arm and thinking that she can’t possibly know that some things that go bump in the night aren’t all that interested in the gender of their victims. “I know you do the best you can.” They do; Maya and Amanita run the club crawls armed with mace and indomitable mama bear attitudes. Stiles is frankly surprised that anybody, even Andrew, would dare stepping out of line with them around. But nobody can protect everybody.

His insides squirm unpleasantly; not even him.

They’re at the front of the line by now, and Stiles says his goodbyes, claiming a forgotten meeting with a prof, and exits the dining hall to emerge in the chilly, bright afternoon. The sun is high, and the air is freezing, and Stiles has discovered precisely nothing useful. There’s no conclusive proof Andrew did anything, but he’s still avoiding Stiles and something at the back of Stiles’ head is insisting something is  _ off _ about the guy.

He rubs his hands together and reaches for his phone, texting Gerda:  _ You win. Let’s do it. _

Time to step up their game.

***

One unintended consequence of all the time Stiles has spent in hospitals is that he’s gotten extremely good at moving through them unnoticed. The key, as in most cases, is just to move like you belong. Confidence, and knowing the floorplan beforehand, will get you everywhere.

It works again, with Gerda keeping close behind him, as they push through the swinging doors into Intensive Care, and pause when the hallway is empty except for the nurses’ desk just ahead. They stop, and Stiles puts his hands on Gerda’s shoulders, squeezing and leaning in close like he’s comforting her. Gerda, who is a naturally gifted accomplice, figures him out immediately and pastes a stricken expression on her face. Her chin even trembles. Amazing.

“So here’s the deal,” says Stiles. “His room’s at the end of the hall, second from the end on the left. The trick is not to avoid eye contact - that just makes you look suspicious - but to make brief, honest-looking contact and move on quickly like what you’re doing is more important than staying to lie to them. That, and avoiding detection in the first place.”

He looks over his shoulder, sees the one nurse stand up, a clipboard in hand, and cross the corridor to enter a room on the left, halfway down.

“C’mon,” he says, grabbing Gerda’s hand.

The door of their destination is open, and the room is dim, the curtains closed. Stiles and Gerda slip inside and push the door mostly shut - not closed, which would attract suspicion, but closed enough that they’re not immediately visible to a passer-by. 

Gerda approaches the bed first. Stiles hangs back, fighting against a sudden, powerful flight instinct, but he pushes it down, down, and follows her. The kid is hooked up to an IV and a handful of monitor wires and propped up like a doll. He looks worn through, transparent; he looks insanely young, even though Stiles knows he’s around the same age as they are. Stiles wraps his arms around himself and shivers, then tells himself to stop being a fucking whiner and get down to business.

But when he looks, really looks, lets himself drop down a little into the dark and look again, he sees… nothing. 

He thinks he must have it wrong, so he tries again. Nothing. Which is impossible, because according to the monitors, Javier McGillian isn’t dead, and that’s the only time anybody should look so faint and faded. Stiles squints, and then he realizes no, there’s not  _ nothing _ , but the sort of glow that surrounds most living things - not quite accurate, but the closest Stiles has ever been able to come to describing it - is just so faded it’s nearly invisible. 

“It’s like somebody drained him dry,” Stiles murmurs, and Gerda, who is standing closer, straightens up from the bent-over pose she was in. Her eyes are wide with surprise and a grim sort of excitement.

“It’s the same,” she says. “The same smell that was on Matty.”

Stiles’ heart does a weird double-beat. “Andrew?” 

Gerda closes her eyes, looks thoughtful. It’s a much more cerebral expression than the one he’s used to seeing on the wolves when they’re puzzling out a scent, much less like she’s immersing herself into the experience and more like she’s working out a difficult math problem, but recognizable nonetheless. “I don’t know. I don’t know him well enough to be sure. But it doesn’t smell quite…”

“Quite what?” Stiles presses when she’s been quiet a while. She opens her eyes, mouth hard. 

“Quite human.”

***

Stiles goes the whole rest of the day without hallucinating any more murderous dead people, which he counts as a win even though they can’t do anything with their new discovery without more information. He gets two papers semi-finished and is so exhausted by that point that he zonks out on top of the covers, bed still spread with books and notes and his laptop open and humming.

It’s dark when he wakes up again, and he’s confused for a long second or two by the light level; definitely night but better lit than it should be for the hour, which he realizes a moment later is coming from the screensaver on his open laptop, perched precariously at the foot of the bed.

Then something soft hits him in the side of the head, and he flails around to see Rashid propped up on one elbow, looking pissed off and half-awake.

“What?” Stiles asks, picking up the pillow on automatic, snapping his laptop shut and sliding it onto the bedside table, out of harm’s way. 

Rashid shakes a hand in his direction, holding something, and now Stiles realizes it’s a phone. Rashid’s phone. 

“Why are you--”

“It’s for you,” Rashid says crankily, and Stiles stares, his brain not quite booted back up yet.

“But that’s your phone,” Stiles says stupidly. 

“I know,” Rashid says, with strained patience. “And you know what? I don’t care. I want to go back to sleep. So can you take it and go outside and tell your weird friends to stop bothering me?”

Stiles takes the phone, and Rashid throws himself back down into his bed, drags the covers over his head, muttering something Stiles can’t hear through all the fabric and pillows.

Stiles stares at the phone, feet carrying him, on automatic, towards the door. It says “Unknown,” but the number is vaguely familiar.

“Hello?” he says into the phone, pulling the door shut behind him.

“Stiles,” snaps Lydia’s voice.

Stiles’ heart gives a weird jump for the second time today, as he starts to panic. “What’s wrong?” he asks, already turning back towards the room. He can be packed and out of here in fifteen minutes, he’s done this a lot--

“Nobody’s dead, nobody’s hurt, nothing’s wrong,” Lydia says quickly, voice going gentle but firm for a second. A pause follows, in which Stiles clutches at his chest. “You weren’t picking up your phone,” Lydia adds, in a less friendly tone.

Stiles pats his pockets, and then remembers that his phone is sitting on his nightstand, probably dead. And then he remembers that he’s been avoiding their calls for a reason, and abruptly his skin starts crawling. 

“Forgot to plug it in,” he says, without much hope for his chances of bluffing his way out of this conversation. “Wait, so you called my roommate? Do I even want to know how you got his number?”

“Stiles,” Lydia says, impatiently, as he steps out into the courtyard, hissing at the cold, “you  _ haven’t been picking up your phone. _ ” Because apparently the less-than-legal means by which she acquired Rashid’s contact information are immaterial to this conversation.

And wow, thinks Stiles, she’s  _ pissed _ . And pissed enough that he can hear and feel it in equal measure despite the physical distance between them.

He instantly feels guilty at the thought, and oh, oh, this is exactly why he’s been avoiding them all. This feeling, right here.

Unfortunately, without everyone’s pitying faces to kindle it in him, it’s a lot harder to muster up indignation or anger, and instead he just feels like a piece of shit.

“You storm out of Christmas dinner without a word,” Lydia says, “you shut us all out, and you know what, we were all trying to give you space, because Derek said you needed it, and so did your dad, and so did Scott--”

Jesus, Stiles doesn’t want to think about Scott right now. About Scott’s face. About standing in his kitchen, nine years old, Scott close behind him with his hand clenched in the back of Stiles’ t-shirt while he hears the worst news of his life.

“--and I get it, Stiles, I do, but now I hear that Derek’s having nightmares and you know what?  _ I don’t think they’re his nightmares. _ ”

Stiles stops pacing - he hadn’t even realized he’d started - and blinks out into the dark. Shit. How did he forget? He can shut them out all he wants but there’s no shutting Derek out, not in both directions, not completely.  _ Shit. _

“Derek’s been having--”

“Yes,” Lydia says sharply.

He folds down onto a bench next to the building entrance, shivering. “Fuck,” he says in a small voice, sagging over his knees. He feels like he might slide right off the bench, curl up on the ground, but he holds himself up by sheer willpower. Despite the wave of crushing despair he doesn’t much want to end up the next front-page story in the local paper, and he really,  _ really  _ doesn’t want to start crying on the phone with Lydia of all people.

Not much he can do about it, apparently, he realizes a moment later when his next breath comes out more like a sob.

Lydia’s silence on the other end of the phone becomes an uncertain one, followed by: “Stiles?” When he doesn’t answer right away, too occupied with biting the inside of his cheek to quiet the next hitched breath from coming out audible, she sighs. “Stiles. Deep breaths.”

When he doesn’t obey immediately, he feels a sudden spark of something sharp and mean along the pack bonds, and he jerks in place, but the shock is enough to get through to him before the feeling has a chance to really get a hold on him. He breathes. He counts. He imagines what that must have felt like to everybody else - Lydia, despite being more human than most of them, has never had any trouble using the pack bonds to her advantage - and he feels guilty all over again. 

“How did you know?” he asks eventually, when they’ve both been quiet a while, Stiles shivering again and Lydia waiting. 

She huffs. “I researched it. You guys were all over each other at Thanksgiving.”

Stiles feels his face heat, but although his feelings for Derek and pack and family are pretty confused right now he can’t really feel embarrassed that part.

“And about the… the other thing? The dreams?”

“Deduction,” Lydia says promptly. Stiles has to admit that’s fair, at least for Lydia. They talked a not-insignificant amount about the mechanics of what he saw, how he saw it, in the aftermath of the spell. He does, however, have to respect the leap from “weird werewolf mate bond” and “quasi-prophetic alternate timeline visions” to “sharing dreams” based only on observation and, he can only assume, conversations with Derek. Only Lydia.

“So were you guys planning on sharing with the group any time soon?” she asks, somewhere closer to teasing than interrogatory, but not quite all the way there.

Stile shrugs, even though she can’t see him. “Eventually,” he says, realizing it’s true even as he says it, even though he and Derek haven’t really discussed it. You can’t really hide things from werewolves - in fact, the more significant, the more intimate something is, the harder it is to hide.

“I don’t really know what I’m doing,” he admits, and it’s not just about Derek, and she knows it.

“No one’s mad,” Lydia says, because she’s always been way too smart for him. He’s never stood a chance.

“It’s not about that,” he says, shutting his eyes, wishing the darkness behind them didn’t keep populating itself with the look on everybody’s faces as he turned his back on them at Christmas - or worse, their faces before that, when they were wondering what he’d do, getting ready to protect him from it. He  _ wishes  _ they’d be mad. It would be easier. 

“No,” she agrees, and he can picture her face, the resignation. She has a pretty good idea of what it’s like when ground you always thought was solid opens up underneath you, and how fucking intolerable it is to let anybody see you clawing your way back up. How much worse it feels.

But when it was her, it was  _ about  _ her. It wasn’t selfish, like it is for him. Not that he wants to explain that to her.

“He hasn’t slept in a couple of days, apparently,” she says finally, and her voice is all the way back down from furious, just a little frustrated, still with a hint of steel. Like she’s mad she can’t be more mad. “You need to… something, Stiles. Just something. Even if it’s just him.”

“Yeah,” he says. because he knows that. He’s known that all along, even when he was refusing to think about what what he was doing was doing to Derek, about anything other than himself. Tentatively, he lets the bond rise up again, the distant buzz familiar and unpleasant, but almost welcome all the same. He sways a little, because it’s intense, after the deprivation, and after everything he said to Derek, to do  _ this _ to him...

“And then go to sleep,” Lydia says, like he’s an idiot. Because he’s an idiot, probably.

“Yeah,” he says again.

Back in the room, Rashid is out cold, and Stiles wipes his call from Rashid’s phone memory before putting it back on his nightstand. He moves the books to his desk, changes into pyjamas, plugs in his own phone; takes his time, stalling.

Finally, when his phone has finally booted back up and he’s curled up under his covers sure he’s never going to sleep, Stiles texts Derek. Just one word.  _ Sorry _ .

_ It’s okay,  _ is all he gets in reply, almost immediately.

He does sleep, but he doesn’t really remember if he dreams or not.

***

It’s better, after that, but not by much. He sleeps, but not well, and mostly he stops seeing dead murderers where they can’t possibly exist; he’s down to once a day rather than three or four. He goes to class, hands in a couple of papers, drinks a lot of coffee. He gets around to the charms and wards he’d promised to a few of the supernatural-adjacent students on campus - casual clients, some who found him through word-of-mouth on campus itself and some who’d heard through the wider supernatural grapevine that he was here, knew who he was. He tends to prefer the former to the latter, at least these days; he’s so far from being in the mood to talk about Mom, even to people who remember her with awe and respect, that it’s not even funny.

It’s not always avoidable, though; there are only a few shops in Berkeley that sell the kind of supplies he needs and only one near enough campus that it’s not a whole expedition to get there. Usually he’s going at weird times, in between classes, and that’s enough that he can get in and out without encountering a lot of people, but it’s not like anybody who does this sort of thing for a living keeps normal 9-to-5 hours. He’s been doing a brisk business in protection charms lately, for obvious reasons, and he can’t put it off any longer. Which is why one afternoon he steps into the shop and the bell jingles and a trio of old ladies look up and spot him immediately and he really, really wants to turn around and walk out again.

Behind the counter, Zeke looks up with a grin. “My favourite customer,” he greets Stiles, and Stiles can’t help smiling when the oldest of the old ladies claps a hand to her chest dramatically.

“Ezekiel, I’m hurt,” she says, and the impression Stiles gets of her is somewhere between Aunt Pearl and somebody’s sweet old grandma. The quavery voice is an obvious put-on, judging by the snickers of her companions, and Zeke gives her an indulgent look. 

“Bubbie, you know I love you. But Stiles here is a big spender, and you know I’m a capitalist at heart.”

“Heartless,” the old lady accuses him, clearly meaning none of it. Whether she’s actually Zeke’s grandmother is anybody’s guess - the shop is a family business, so she might be - but Zeke likes everybody. Stiles can’t even consider it a failing, because Zeke’s just so  _ nice _ it’s not even possible to find it annoying.

“The usual?” Zeke asks Stiles, and Stiles tilts a hand in the air - so-so - and slides his list across the counter. Zeke squints at it for a moment, and then his eyes widen. 

“We got a rogue drinker in town?” he asks, but he turns around and starts pulling down jars and bottles and little paper bags to fill Stiles’ order right away.

“Eh, not as far as I know,” Stiles says, unable to completely suppress his shiver. He knows, objectively, that vampires aren’t, like, automatically  _ evil _ , but he’s never met one who doesn’t give him the creeps. “This is more of a… contingency sort of thing.”

“Something I should know about?” Zeke asks, tipping a scoop of something green and pungent into  little paper sack and twisting the top efficiently shut. The other function served by shops like these is as central rumour mill. He’s used Zeke before to get the word out about something nasty rolling into town, and to pick up hints about something somebody else has put out a warning about. Berkeley is a relatively quiet town for stuff like that, at least compared to Beacon Hills, but any city has the occasional bump in the night and it’s easier to steer clear or hunt things down when you can get information from people who actually know what they’re looking at.

“Hopefully not,” Stiles hedges, watching the pile of paper packets grow one by one as Zeke goes through the list. 

“And I suppose you’re taking care of it yourself, young man?” asks Old Lady #2, and Old-Lady-#1-Possibly-Bubbie looks skeptical. “You seem rather young for a keeper of the peace.”

And wow, he hasn’t heard that term in a while. From a truly ancient werewolf, once, and once from Deaton, making an obscure reference. From what he understands from Aunt Pearl, it doesn’t really apply to their family’s particular way of handling things, anyway. They’ve always been more… pro-active.

Zeke shakes his head, rolls his eyes in a way that makes Stiles think that probably the Bubbie thing was a proper name rather than a joke. “Bubbie, he’s not a dabbler.”

Bubbie raises her eyebrows, draws herself up a little. “Oh?” she asks, in a tone that indicates that she doubts this, very much.

“Bubbie,” says Zeke, tapping down the last little paper bag and twisting it shut before adding it to the pile, “this is Stiles Stilinski.” Then he darts a look in Stiles’ direction. “Sorry, man,” he says, a little guiltily, “blew your cover.”

Stiles sighs, lets his shoulders drop, and meets Bubbie’s eyes. As a rule he keeps himself pretty contained when not in the midst of an emergency, but now he lets himself show, just a little bit. Old Lady #3 gasps, and #2 and Bubbie’s eyes both widen a little bit. Bubbie frowns, then nods sharply, holding out her hands, palm up. Stiles mirrors her. 

“Stilinski,” she says thoughtfully, when the niceties are past. “I knew your mother,” she adds. “I know your aunt. She still traipsing over foreign mountaintops she’s got no business on?”

“Regularly,” Stiles tells her, smiling despite the stab of guilt over the fact that he’s been avoiding Aunt Pearl’s calls, too.

“You hear things about Beacon Hills, now and again,” Old Lady #2 says. “You kids are doing a good job, despite everything.” There’s a sympathetic head-tilt in there that Stiles acknowledges, but then ignores, desperate to stop talking about his pack and hoping they don’t notice.

“And what’s all this about a vampire?” asks Old Lady #3, looking extremely put out by the idea.

“I don’t think it’s a vampire,” Stiles says again, as Zeke weighs bags, one by one, and tallies them all up on a stand-mounted iPad, which beeps as a little white box connected via Bluetooth spits out a slip of paper. Stiles considers briefly before saying anything, but decides that they might have some ideas. “Something’s been attacking students. Two since the beginning of the year, both… I guess ‘drained’ is the right word, but no blood involved. No deaths.”

“I read about that,” Zeke says, accepting Stiles’ credit card and running it through the iPad’s Square reader. “The kid from the club crawl.” Zeke’s only in his early twenties, so “kid” is a little funny, but has made it clear on numerous occasions that he finds the undergrads painfully young, especially the new baby wannabe witches of various genders who wander into the shop bedecked in dark eyeliner and spiky silver jewelry. Most of them haven’t even a sniff of power, but the shop has a back-corner section of books on New Age Wicca and tarot cards and incense assembled to cater to that crowd precisely. Zeke really  _ is  _ a capitalist at heart.

“But drained, you said,” says Bubbie. “Dark.”

Stiles raises his eyebrows at her, and she scoffs. “I haven’t got much power, boy, but that’s mothering stuff.” She tilts her head, thoughtfully. “There’s more than one kind of life-taker, you know.”

Stiles stares at her. “Life-taker.” He thinks back. He’s heard the term, more as a category than a type. Maybe referring to wendigos? Saying that they  _ weren’t _ , that it didn’t apply to them, because they fed on those already dead.

“Feed on lifeforce,” Zeke says, nodding along. “It’s a pretty vague descriptor.”

“Vampires, incubi, mares, that sort of thing,” agrees Old Lady #3, and then she smiles. “Oh, we haven’t had an incubus around here in… how long? Delia, do you remember Anthony?”

For a brief, terrifying moment, Zeke and Stiles are united in the horror of three octogenarian women giggling like schoolgirls and agreeing that “Anthony” was “a lovely boy.”

But eventually Bubbie - or rather, Delia - quiets them to say: “Those boys didn’t die, though,” she says. “No violence?”

“Not a mark on them,” agrees Stiles, an idea beginning to form at the back of his mind. He can’t quite get his hands around it, but it’s there. Just an idea.

“Sex demon,” pronounces Old Lady #3, with a nod, and then looks chagrined. “Oh, that’s a very old-fashioned term.”

“It’s a good bet,” Stiles agrees, remembering, now, the way Andrew always seemed a little  _ too _ convincing, the way it charmed other people but mostly just made Stiles’ head hurt. “They were both clubbing the night before, dancing and…” He cannot say  _ grinding  _ to three eighty-something old ladies. He just can’t.

Though judging by the leer on Old Lady #2’s face, he doesn’t have to. Next to him, Zeke mutters something rude-sounding in Yiddish and stares up at the ceiling. 

“Sex always makes things strange,” Delia is saying now, meditatively. “Muddles up the brain. Throw in magic and you just have a mess. But then you’d know all about that,” she says, giving Stiles a look that’s probably meant to be significant. 

Stiles just blinks at her. “Uh,” he says, “why?”

Delia flaps a hand at him, as though he’s being willfully obtuse. “Always was surprised when Sarah had a boy,” she says, not even really talking to him. “Not many, in that family.”

He can hear Aunt Pearl in his memory:  _ Boys rarely inherit. Even in our family _ .

Stiles squirms under their gaze. It’s not like it hasn’t crossed his mind before. He’s run across enough other workers by now that he’s seen most of the range, and magic is so much about identity - blood and names and intentions and desire and sometimes touching on seemingly inconsequential things like gender and sexuality - that it would have been impossible not to notice that the way his magic works, his family’s magic, is not the sort of magic that usually works well for people who identify as male. He just hasn’t really given it much thought, beyond a sort of vague affirmation that it explained a part of why he’d been left in the dark for so long.

Bubbie Delia is giving him a sly look that reminds him very, very strongly of Aunt Pearl.

Stiles turns back to the counter, where Zeke has bagged up his order and is holding it out to him with a smile that falls just short of overcompensation. “I am so sorry,” he stage-whispers, just barely ducking away in time when Delia reaches out to pinch him on the arm.

“Be nice to an old lady,” she says, as Stiles clutches the bag to his chest and tries to decide if fleeing the shop at a run would be rude.

In the end, he nods at them and thanks them, thanks Zeke, and leaves with something at least vaguely approximating decorum.

He gets out his phone when he’s halfway back and texts Gerda.

_ What do you know about incubi? _

_ Never met one _ , answers Gerda, a minute or so later. Another minute passes, and then his phone rings. Gerda’s out of breath. She must have ducked out of a lecture.

“You’ve got a lead?”

“Sex demons,” Stiles says, instead of “yes.”

_ Sex demons _ . Just when he thought life couldn’t get any more bizarre.

***

Of course, when they get around to checking, Andrew is gone. “Yeah, I dunno, man,” says his roommate, who is an unfairly gorgeous six-foot-three football player. “He had some field school thing. He’s gone until next week.”

“Gone,” says Gerda flatly, but it sounds more like “fucker.”

“Yeah,” agrees the football player, whose name is, apparently, actually Chad. “I can give you his phone number--”

“Nah, I got it,” Stiles says quickly. “Don’t even worry about it.” He really doesn’t want Andrew to know that Stiles is looking for him. Whatever Andrew knows or doesn’t know about what’s been happening, Stiles is sure he doesn’t want the guy forewarned, lest he decide it’s better not to risk coming back to campus where Stiles can get to him.

“Okay, cool,” says Chad, turning around and dropping back into bed. He doesn’t even bother to close his door.

“Do you really think he’s an incubus?” asks Gerda when they’re back outside. “I always imagined them more sort of…” She makes a vague hand-gesture that despite its vagueness manages to communicate a definite slinky quality.

“People adapt, I guess,” Stiles says, shrugging.

“What, like, hipster camouflage?” Gerda says, not a little meanly, but then lapses into thoughtful silence.

“Or,” Stiles says after a minute or two, hesitantly, “or he doesn’t know.”

Gerda stops, hands on hips. “How can he not  _ know _ ?” she demands, but she looks more upset than angry - frustrated.

“I agree, there should be a pretty obvious cause-and-effect process between, like, making out in a club and your whoopie-partner lapsing into a coma, but…”

Gerda stares at him, her mouth open, and then abruptly half-collapses into giggles that wind down eventually into tired wheezes. Stiles guides her over to a bench and they sit down as she pulls herself together, wiping at her eyes. Orange polish today, with white stripes.

“You really think he doesn’t know?” Gerda asks, subdued now, fingers laced together in her lap.

“I don’t know,” Stiles admits. “But I - I’ve got a pretty good sense about people, and Andrew’s, you know… thinks he’s hot shit, not great at taking no for an answer, doesn’t believe in bisexuals, but…”

“He’s a jerk but you don’t think he’s a monster,” Gerda summarizes.

Stiles shrugs. “I’ve gotten pretty good at telling whether somebody wants to hurt me, or hurt the people I care about,” he says, quietly. “And I get a lot of other shit off of Andrew, but my fleeting occasional desire to wring his neck is not grounded in any actual malice on his part. It’s just, you know, he’s an asshole. Besides, you know, you’d be surprised how easy it is to be… not entirely human, and not know.”

And he’s thinking about Scott, yeah, and how  _ impossible _ it seemed when Stiles first said the word “werewolf,” but he’s thinking about himself, too; all the things about the way he knew things, the way he felt things, that didn’t make any sense, and the available explanations were too crazy to consider. 

“You mean he doesn’t know  _ anything _ ,” Gerda says softly, thoughtful again. “Hmm. He did look pretty fucking scared of you that time in the coffee shop.”

“Yeah,” Stiles agrees. He won’t pretend he’s not scary in his own right, but he  _ saw _ that fear. He’s seen it on the faces of people who see werewolves for the first time. Suddenly Stiles remembers that day in the library, the  _ push  _ he gave Andrew when he just wouldn’t accept Stiles’ “no,” kept pressing and wheedling. Remembers the look on his face.

Maybe he didn’t know.  _ Doesn’t _ .

“Oh well,” Stiles says, slapping his knees and getting up. “Nothing we can do about it until the dude’s back on campus, anyway.” He turns to look at Gerda, who’s got her arms crossed, glaring at the ground. “Wanna come help me make like thirty protection charms?”

Gerda looks up, drops her hands into her lap. “No witchy powers required?”

“Nah. All but the last part’s just like, measuring stuff into tiny little jars. Then at the end I do my thing.” He wiggles the fingers on one hand before reaching it out to pull her up. “I’ll even cut you in on the profits. How’s forty percent sound?”

She smiles, willing be cheered up. “Not as good as fifty.”

“You drive a hard bargain,” he says, turning to head for the cafe. “You buy the coffee and you’ve got a deal.”

***

With Gerda’s help, it only takes them the rest of the afternoon to finish all twenty-six charms, for Stiles to give them all a little bit of juice, and another two hours sitting at a table at the far end of the dining hall waiting for people to come pick up their goods after the mass text he sent out. It’s dark by the time they’re headed back to the dorms, and he’s tired in an almost pleasant way for a change, the way he always is after working a lot of magic, though charms like that don’t take much of a zap out of him so it’s probably exhaustion, shitty sleep and all the things he’s avoiding as much as the work.

His defenses are low, is what he figures, later. That’s why he doesn’t see the guy from far off, though he should - why he keeps walking, hands in pockets, Gerda at his side, equally tired but worn down to a low simmer, instead of recognizing the guy right away. Then again, it’s been eleven years, and his memory of the man is vague and distant and warped by the nightmarish tinge of a lifetime of childish fear and rage.

Norman Palaver is three feet away when Stiles realizes that that’s who he’s seeing, and at the same realizes that he can’t possibly be seeing him, because Palaver is  _ dead _ , Aunt Pearl killed him and was glad about it, he’s been dead for over a year, he can’t be here--

\--but all that’s working in Stiles’ brain is the panicked windup of childhood memory and a fight-or-flight response that rises up in him like a scream, and he can’t--

\--Palaver is there, face grim and determined and he’s reaching out a hand, reaching for Stiles, reaching out like he did for Mom, corruption in his touch, and--

“Stiles!” It’s Gerda, it’s Gerda’s voice, and he’s cold, and it’s dark, but they’re alone, the man is gone. The man was going to hurt Mom but - but he’s gone, he’s dead, Stiles  _ knows  _ that, why can’t he  _ breathe-- _

Gerda’s face swims into view above him and she’s dragging him up, trying anyway, but he’s a dead weight despite her strength, sinking fast, can’t get air into his lungs. He can hear her, hear the words, telling him to count, telling him to breathe, because of course Gerda knows how to breathe when you can’t breathe, she spent her early childhood fighting her lungs’ screaming for oxygen-rich water rather than air, she knows, she’s doing everything right, but he can’t-- he can’t--

Gerda’s face blinks past his eyes again, just for a moment. She looks terrified. He feels kind of bad about that for a second, at least until he passes out.


	3. The Spark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _They caught it late,_ Stiles hears in his mind, Dad’s voice. _They’re going to try. But you need to be prepared._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair warning that writing this one _wrecked me._ Like, I am such an asshole. You have been warned.

 

 

Stiles’ phone rings at not-quite-five in the morning, and it’s Mom, and he just _knows_.

“Sorry to wake you, honey, but…” And she sounds tired; she sounds sad.

“I’ll be home in a few hours,” he assures her, and gets out of bed.

***

It’s not like it’s a surprise, Stiles thinks, as he nears Beacon Hills and feels the warmth of the wards at a distance. It’s a familiar feeling, the town welcoming him back; it’s something he’s expected at the back of his head, ever since he was a little boy and started learning his first magic. The other feeling is new, but accustomed - this faint but growing sense of resignation, of something terrible outside of his control.

Melissa’s been sick for a while. It wasn’t serious at first - just a little spot that she initially delayed getting handled for months. By the time she had it checked, half a year on, it was a dark carcinoma the size of her palm. It was on the back of her calf, out of sight, and they’d had a badly busy run at the hospital, followed by Dad’s heart attack scare; for a while there, they’d all been distracted.

She’d told them it was no big deal. An excision and then no new symptoms, no new marks, and then about a month ago she’d sat them down at a pack dinner and told them all that she was going in for surgery again. Talia had had a hand on her arm the whole time, grounding and sure. It had been a shock, definitely, and Scott had been white-faced and wobbly afterwards, while Talia took Melissa aside to offer… well, other avenues, was how she put it. If things went badly. The Bite, Stiles had figured. Though it didn’t work for everyone, and he remembered hearing them talk about it with Mom and Dad, years ago before Scott was turned to cure his asthma, which had become severe enough to be life-threatening. Melissa wasn’t a good candidate, for whatever reason people were or weren’t. But Talia had offered, then. It was normal to offer, whatever the answer was.

Melissa had thanked her, but said she wanted to beat it the old-fashioned way. It was a relatively low-risk type of cancer, and she was confident, she said, in her chances.

 _They caught it late,_ Stiles hears in his mind, Dad’s voice. _They’re going to try. But you need to be prepared._

The memory is accompanied by a stab of… panic? He’s not even sure. It’s there-and-then-gone, but for a second, sitting at a stop light, Stiles is utterly overcome with loss. And it feels misplaced, personal, like someone has reached into his chest and pulled out something vital. Not quite like the secret, guilty almost-relief he’s felt every time he remembered about Melissa: _at least it’s not Mom._ Mom did have a cancer scare once, when he was really little; something not quite natural, brought on by some bad-news worker hired to upset the power balance in Beacon Hills. He doesn’t remember the details, but Mom was fine, in the end.

Mom’s _fine._

Behind him, someone honks, and he blinks. The light’s green. He drives through the intersection, shaking himself, just in time for it to turn yellow again. In his rearview, he can see the guy in the other car flipping him off.

He’s only a little ways inside of the town limits, driving through the trees, when he sees the shadow pacing him in the woods behind the road. Smiling to himself, he slows down and pulls over, and Derek steps out of the trees and jogs up to the Jeep. As he climbs inside, he pulls Stiles over the gearshift and kisses him, easy with long habit, and then presses his face close up against the side of Stiles’ throat - also out of long habit. He’s shaved, and recently; there’s almost no prickle of stubble, and Stiles shivers. It’s probably desperately inappropriate to be thinking about sex when you’re on the way to somebody’s hospital bedside, but he hasn’t seen Derek in a few weeks and they haven’t had sex in a little longer than that; it’s hard to get privacy in a pack the size of theirs, and harder in a dorm room Stiles shares with a roommate who barely tolerates him.

“You smell like a thousand strangers and a lot of bad food,” Derek murmurs, a little sulkily.

“I didn’t have time to shower,” Stiles tells him, dropping a last kiss just above Derek’s right eyebrow as he pulls back. “Just threw everything in the car and got on the road.” He starts the car again and pulls back onto the road, and Derek’s fingers tangle with his once he’s finished shifting gears and gotten up to speed.

“How’s she doing?” he finally musters up the courage to ask.

He can feel Derek hesitate, uncertainty and sadness resonating across their bond. After all these years Stiles doesn’t need him to speak to know that it’s not good, or that Derek doesn’t really know how to approach this. After all, terminal illnesses aren’t generally something most werewolves will ever have to face, and Derek’s never lost anybody, not like this. His fingers tighten around Stiles’ on the gearshift, and Stiles resists the urge to pause and comfort Derek; there will be time for that later.

“When your mom called earlier,” Derek said, “she said it wouldn’t be long now.”

***

The hospital is a familiar, almost comfortable place, which Stiles realizes is pretty weird. But he and Scott have been best friends almost all their lives, and his mom is a nurse, and with Scott’s frequent childhood visits to the emergency room Stiles spent a lot of time there, as a kid. But they were always indulgent with Scott and Stiles, and they always made things better, and when they couldn’t help any more, Ms. Talia did.

He knows the best parking spots, and the last places the parking attendants check, and sets a timer on his phone as they get out of the Jeep and head for the main entrance so he’ll have time to get down here and move to a new spot before he’s ticketed. Derek’s fingers tangle up with his again as they walk into the hospital, and Stiles holds on tight, because he knows the smell of the place, the distress and pain in the air, always puts Derek on edge. For Stiles, there’s nothing to fear, here.

Just things he can’t change.

It surprises him, then, when he steps over the threshold and for a second, he can’t breathe. His heart lurches, and he wants nothing more than to turn around and walk back out again, the hospital a hostile place, enemy territory. Beside him, Derek shifts, radiating worry and confusion above and beyond his usual baseline discomfort.

“Stiles?” He turns Stiles’ face towards him, and Stiles focuses, and the feeling is abruptly gone. Derek’s face is the same as ever, familiar and kind, eyebrows furrowed with concern.

“I’m okay,” Stiles says, but his voice sounds strange, even to himself.

“What was that?” Derek asks, rubbing a hand briskly up and down the outside of Stiles’ arm. “You just went… cold, all over. Is it the hospital?” His face turns grim. “I hate this place too.”

But no, Stiles thinks, looking around. The hospital is the same as ever; a place he knows almost as well as their high school. No monsters here. He shakes his head.

“I think I’m just tired,” he says, tugging on Derek’s hand until he follows, reluctantly. “Come on.” And they head for the elevators.

There’s a good-sized crowd in the waiting area on the third floor, and it’s all theirs. Mostly the pack; Derek’s younger siblings, Graham and Natalie, are slumped back in chairs, looking about as uncomfortable as Derek. Peter has Ewan on his lap, and the boy is busily scribbling in a Barbie colouring book. Scott’s not there, and neither is Mom, but Scott’s girlfriend is sitting in the ugly orange loveseat with Erica, who has an arm around her shoulders. Kira, who holds the title for Nicest Person Stiles Has Ever Met, is always so cheerful, and she looks utterly unlike herself right now, eyes puffy and red. She looks up and spots stiles, and blots hastily at her eyes. “Oh, don’t tell him I was crying,” she says, and her voice sounds wobbly, like it’s been going on a while.

Kira and her family - the only kitsunes Stiles has ever met - moved to Beacon Hills when they were in high school, and she and Melissa have always gotten along like a house on fire. She was probably the most upset when they heard about the diagnosis the first time, but she’s been keeping the crying to herself, probably because Scott’s been so obviously broken by the whole thing. Stiles knows how she feels; Scott, even in the midst of all of this, is still Scott, and the last thing he needs is to have to comfort other people whose parents are alive and perfectly well.

Stiles takes Erica’s place on the loveseat for a minute, though, letting Kira sniffle into his shoulder, until Mom and Talia come through the swinging doors at the end of the hall and approach them. He looks up and meets Derek’s eyes, and they exchange a brief touch of hands, Derek’s shoulder brushing against his, as Derek takes his place on the loveseat.

He’d almost forgotten the feeling from earlier, the relief, until Mom spots him. Suddenly he’s desperate to touch her, to let her fold him up in her arms, to cling like a little kid. He’s abruptly on the edge of tears, and Mom gathers him up, surprised but not bothered. “Hey, Baby, hey, it’s okay,” she says, turning them away a little so they’re not in direct line of sight to the others. He feels more than sees Talia and Mom exchange a look and Talia carries on to join them.

For all its strength, the feeling doesn’t last long, and he pulls away, or tries to. Mom catches him, though, hand cupped under his chin, looking intently up at him. “You okay, Baby?” she asks softly - the wolves can hear them, certainly, but they’re probably not listening right now; are probably being polite.

“Yeah, I--” He’s not really crying, not exactly, but he wipes at his eyes anyway, tries to push down the feeling of desperate relief that surged up inside of him when he saw her. “Sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

She frowns at him, cups the side of his face. “Don’t you?” she asks, and he sighs. She pulls him down enough to kiss him on the forehead, and then lets him step back.

“She’s asleep right now, but Scott’s in there, if you want to go and…”

“Yeah, yeah, I should,” Stiles says, and heads for the swinging doors with a last backwards glance at her - healthy, whole, and here, and he feels so guilty, but not enough to stop.

Melissa’s in a room of her own, and she is, just like Mom said, asleep. Scott’s not, but it’s a near thing; he’s nodding off even as Stiles steps into the room. His chin comes up; he’s scenting the air even before his eyes open and focus on Stiles.

Despite everything, he smiles. Stiles smiles back, though it’s subdued, trying to get a read on his friend as he crosses the room. Scott looks tired, and very like he’s been crying, though it doesn’t show on a wolf the way it does on a human, at least not for very long. He walks right into the hug, and Scott’s breath hitches a little as he presses his face to Stiles’ stomach, squeezing just a little bit too hard.

Eventually Scott pulls back, and Stiles drops down in the chair next to him; he glances at Melissa, but she sleeps on. Scott stares at her too, like he’s afraid to look away.

“Have you slept?” Stiles asks, and Scott glances at him, but shakes his head.

“Not - I will,” he says, when Stiles opens his mouth. “I just,” he waves a hand at his mom, “don’t want to miss… anything.”

He’s crying again, pretty quietly, and Stiles wonders if he’s stopped in the last couple of days. He notices the half-dozen empty water bottles on the bedside table, and guesses not very often.

“Yeah,” he says. “I get it.” He pats himself down until he finds the packet of kleenex in his pocket and hands it over. Scott takes it, and dries his eyes for the moment, and says: “Talia won’t… she said it won’t take.”

Stiles blinks at him before what he’s saying really penetrates. The Bite. _Oh_.

Scott nods, and glances at the monitors as if to make sure Melissa’s asleep before continuing: “We had a whole… a whole big fight about it.”

“You and Talia?” Stiles is astonished. Scott’s always been the most agreeable person he’s ever met, and certainly the most agreeable beta in Hale pack, including Talia’s own children. Stiles can’t even imagine him having a screaming fight with anyone, least of all his Alpha.

“No,” Scott says, a little chagrined. “Me and Mom.”

“Oh.” That makes more sense, and now Stiles wonders if Scott even knew about that long-ago conversation, back before Scott himself was turned - Talia’s first offer, the implication that she wasn’t sure it would work, anyway. But the Bite is always seen as a last resort, without a formal offer or request. There has to be consent, understanding. Melissa’s always been pragmatic, practical, and Stiles can’t picture her turning down the Bite if it had a chance of curing her. And Bites that don’t take… well, it’s ugly. It wouldn’t be peaceful, painless, like this looks.

“They probably know what they’re talking about,” Stiles says, as gently as he can.

Scott stares at the far wall, something like anger flaring in his eyes for a brief instant, but then it’s gone, and he’s just covering his face with both hands. “I know,” he says, muffled, voice unsteady. When he looks at Stiles, he just looks confused. “It’s not _fair_ ,” he says, voice soft.

“I know,” Stiles says, helplessly, and pulls him close again.

It’s probably a while later that somebody squeezes his shoulder, gives him a gentle little shake, and Stiles opens his eyes to realize they fell asleep there, propped up against each other next to Melissa’s bed. It’s Dad bent over him, still wearing his uniform, hand on Stiles’ shoulder.

“You awake, Kiddo?” Dad asks, and Stiles yawns, nods. Behind Dad is Laura in her Deputy’s uniform, and she steps around Dad to crouch down in front of Scott’s chair. Scott’s still pretty much out, so it takes another shake, Laura reaching up to ruffle his hair.

“Hey, Scott,” she says softly, as he opens his eyes, looks around, confused. His eyes light on Melissa, who’s still sleeping. The monitors are all clicking and beeping along busily, and he relaxes before really looking at Laura, who smiles at him before exchanging a glance with Dad.

“I think you should go get some rest, Scotty,” she says, and Scott opens his mouth to protest, but she just shakes her head. “You’ve been here over two days,” she says, with a bit of steel in her tone. “I promise you’ll know if anything happens, and it’s not like it’s far to come back. But you need to sleep.”

Scott sags in his chair. “Alpha’s orders, if it helps,” Laura says gently, pulling him to his feet as Stiles stands up, too.

“Okay,” Scott says, subdued, and lets her guide him out into the hall, giving his mom a kiss on the cheek before he goes.

Out in the waiting room, the crowd seems to have undergone a shift change; Luke is there now, and the younger Hale kids have gone home, but Peter’s wife Trudy is there. Derek’s still sitting on the loveseat with Erica, but Kira has left for now, her leather jacket still thrown over the arm of a chair. Nobody says anything to Scott when they appear, but there are a fair share of sympathetic looks and gentle smiles, and even Stiles can feel the way the pack is reaching out, holding Scott up. Scott just slumps against Stiles’ side, rubbing his eyes tiredly.

“Why don’t you go home with Stiles?” Dad is saying, and Laura’s nodding. Scott just shrugs, apparently reduced to pantomime, and lets himself be led down the hall, out the front door, and over to Stiles’ Jeep, which has been moved to the other end of the lot while they were inside. Derek comes up behind them and neatly pickpockets Stiles’ keys as Dad gets Scott buckled in in the back seat.

“I’ll drop them off,” Derek says, and Dad nods, clapping him on the back.

“I appreciate it, Son,” he says, as Stiles climbs into the passenger seat with a scowl. “And you, I’ll see in the morning,” Dad says then, leaning through the window to give Stiles a hug.

Back at the house they get Scott up the stairs and into Stiles’ bed, and he’s mostly asleep even before they pull off his shoes and jeans and lay him down. Back downstairs, Derek gathers Stiles up and just holds him there, breathing, vibrating with tension, until Stiles sighs, rubs their cheeks together, and steps back a little.

“Thanks for this,” he says, and Derek kisses him, eyes closed, thumb fitted neatly behind Stiles’ ear. It draws some of the stiffness out of Stiles’ posture; Derek used to joke that that spot was his snooze button, but Stiles thinks it’s just that he’s programmed, after all these years, to read that particular touch, from Derek, as grounding.

“How you gonna get back to the--” Stiles says, a little slurred with fatigue. He didn’t get what you’d call a full night’s sleep, and Scott’s misery is affecting him a little more than he expected.

“I can run back,” Derek says, quietly, eyes careful on Stiles’ face. He still seems unsure - doesn’t know what to say, what to do - but he’s here, and that’s a lot. He’s always been here. “But I can come back in the morning, before you go back.”

“That’d be good,” Stiles murmurs, tipping their foreheads together. He doesn’t know what to say, either. He knows it’s selfish, knows it’s a horrible thing to feel. “I’m really glad you’re a werewolf,” is what he says aloud, and Derek snorts a laugh as Stiles groans. “That sounds stupid.”

Derek shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I know what you mean.” He tilts his head to the side, a little.

Stiles shakes his head, though it’s not fully a denial. “I keep remembering the time Mom got sick,” he says, mostly a whisper, like he’s confessing. “And I’m… I’m _glad_ , Derek.” he meets Derek’s eyes again, finding them dark and anxious.

“No,” Derek says. “I’ve been thinking… I’m just so glad it’s not _you_.” There’s a spike of fear there, deeply-buried, but present.

“Because I’m human?”

Derek frowns. “I don’t mean it like that.”

“I know you don’t,” Stiles tells him, smoothing hands over Derek’s shoulders. “I know it’s weird for you guys. But you’re… you’re doing good.”

“So are you,” Derek tells him, low and earnest, and Stiles can feel him pushing the feeling through their bond; how deeply he believes it, even though there are kinds of loss that Derek won’t ever know, if the universe is kind. Werewolves aren’t exactly immortal, but there are some kinds of death - illness like this among them - that can’t ever touch them the same way.

Stiles laughs, but it’s a brittle sound. “Standing here being glad it’s my best friend’s mom instead of mine?” He shakes his head again, but Derek stops him, hand cradling the back of his skull, and leans in close.

“You can’t have feelings _wrong_ ,” Derek says. “They can hurt you or help you, but they’re not right or wrong. And that’s okay.”

Stiles smiles, then, because Earnest Counsellor Derek always makes him smile. “If this is your usual therapy routine, it’s no wonder those kids at the community centre like you so much,” he says, and Derek grins, looking away bashfully.

“They do all the work,” he says, looking back at Stiles. “And you’re going to be fine. And so is Scott.” And he’s so sure that Stiles believes him, mostly.

Once Derek’s loped off into the woods behind the house, Stiles goes upstairs to his room, where Scott is sleeping uneasily. Stiles shucks off shoes and jeans and hoodie and crawls into bed, and Scott’s eyes open immediately. He’s awake, but the exhaustion is like a shadow around him, making him flat and colourless to Stiles’ other senses.

They lie there for a long while, both tired but eyes open, until Scott says: “I feel like we’re seven years old all over again.” It’s a low murmur, but in the cocoon of the blankets it’s like the words are dropped directly into Stiles’ head.

“No footie pyjamas,” Stiles whispers back, and Scott laughs, face pressed into the pillow. When he looks up, the careful face is gone, and he _looks_ like Stiles remembers him as a kid, face red and tear-streaked after they watched his dad’s car disappear down the street.

“Stiles,” he croaks, “Stiles, I--”

Stiles pulls him in then, and it’s awful, the way it feels like Scott has broken, everything that was holding this back suddenly gone. He’s bigger than Stiles even though Stiles is a little taller, he has been for a long time, even before he was a werewolf, but their bodies remember this, and he curls into Stiles’ chest, his arms, like they’re the only things in the world that can protect him.

But Scott is never, ever going to be alone. Never, for the rest of his life. He’s going to be okay. He _is_.

They fall asleep again, curled up together like children, and Stiles doesn’t dream. When he wakes again, it’s still deep-dark night, and he can’t tell what woke him.

At least, not until he sits up, and the urgency rolls over him like a wave, and he knows he needs to _go_.

He doesn’t remember getting up, pulling his clothes back on, or walking down the stairs, but suddenly he’s back at the hospital, parking and getting out without even locking the doors, and moving at a brisk walk rather than a run only because there are nurses everywhere and they’d just yell at him to slow down. But he needs to hurry, he needs to find-- if he misses it, he’ll never forgive himself--

It’s strange, because when he pushes through the door and sees Mom, sitting at Melissa’s bedside with a book open in her lap, he knows the driving, panicked urgency spinning through him makes no sense. There is nothing hurried about what’s happening now, nothing touchable. Mom is fine, healthy and _present_ , and he realizes with a jolt that that’s the second time he’s thought that in twenty-four hours, and nothing about the terror he feels at the thought of the contrary is explicable by a brief scare so long ago he can barely remember it. Of _course_ Mom is fine. Why shouldn’t she be?

And yet.

He’s practically vibrating on the spot, and Mom glances at Melissa’s sleeping face, puts down her book, and reaches for him. “Sit down, Baby,” she says, pulling him down into the chair next to her. “You look like you’re about to… well, I don’t know what, exactly. Burn right up. Sit down, take deep breaths. Come on.”

As soon as she touches him, it’s okay, or mostly. The unreasoning terror backs off like a wave going out with the tide, though it’s still there, deep and dark and waiting, and he doesn’t understand.

Mom is watching him, hands tight around his, eyes dark and hard to read. “You’ve had a hard time of it, haven’t you?” Her voice is soft. She touches his face, and he closes his eyes, sagging forward into her touch.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he tells her. “I keep getting… scared. Of… I don’t even know. I’ve never…” He swallows, glances at Melissa, but his gaze is drawn back to Mom almost against his will. “I’ve never been this scared.” He sits up straight, remembering: “Fuck, I just… I left Scott alone. I should…”

“Scott’s fine,” says Mom. “Graham and Erica are with him.” She pulls him back into the chair. “Right now I’m more worried about you.”

“Me?” Stiles shakes his head. This isn’t right. “I’m fine. _You’re_ fine. This isn’t about me. I’m just…” _Making it about me. Being selfish_. He drops his head forward, closes his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

Mom sighs, and it’s… he doesn’t know how to read it. Not just sadness. He looks at her, and she’s shaking her head. “No,” she says. “It’s not your fault, Baby. It never was. Not when it was me, and not now.”

It takes a few seconds for the words to penetrate, because they don’t make a lot of sense. And then--

\-- _oh_.

He remembers. With a feeling like a rollercoaster jerking to a stop at the top of a climb, he _remembers_.

He’s short of breath for a minute, but Mom reaches out, hand on the back of his neck, and he calms, little by little. He expects to wake up, for the room and Mom and Melissa to go translucent and dreamlike and disappear, but the room stays. Mom stays.

 _Mom_.

How did he forget?

His breath is like ice in his chest. “How did you know?”

“How do you think?” she says, touching his temple with two fingertips, and oh. Of course. Of _course_ she knows. “You’re still you, but you’re different from my Zim. You carry more.” She tilts her head, apologetically. “It’s hard to miss.”

She looks at him, eyes sad, and not just because of where they are. She must have seen him, too, the way he saw himself, saw her, in all those other might-have-beens where things turned out differently.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, voice low.

“What for?” She reaches out and takes his hand where it lies, unresisting, in his lap. Her hands are warm and dry and strong. “You did the best you could. That’s all I could have done, even if I’d been there. Your me.” She looks sad again, takes a funny, short little breath and presses her lips together. “ _I’m_ sorry. That’s what she’d say, what I’d say. That she wasn’t there. I’m sorry you had to go through that. Nobody should have to.” She looks at Melissa, sleeping on, peaceful. “It’s going to be so hard on Scott.”

Stiles feels guilty again, thinks of his Scott, more concerned with his mom, with Stiles, than with himself. God.

“I always think I could have - should have - done something.” It’s almost the first time he’s ever said it aloud. He’s hinted at it, with Aunt Pearl, who just shook her head and talked about inevitabilities, and with Derek, who so vehemently denied the possibility that Stiles knew he was talking as much about himself as Stiles; hard-won certainty with the help of professionals, Stiles knows, so he didn’t dare argue.

But Mom… she’s just shaking her head.

“You were just a little boy. You’re still my boy now, and you’re a good boy. A smart boy.” The nickname Aunt Pearl still uses for him. His eyes well up with tears, and he looks away, but she grabs him firmly by the chin, makes him look at her. “Do you blame your Derek for what happened to his family?”

He doesn’t ask how she knows - maybe he’s too distracted by the flood of negation that rises up from inside him at the very idea.

“What? _No_. I--”

“Why not?”

Stiles can feel his hands shaking. “He was just a kid,” he says. “A lonely kid. He didn’t know what would happen.” He doesn’t say _because I wasn’t there, because you died so things weren’t the way they were supposed to be_ , but she seems to hear the words anyway.

“An innocent,” Mom says, her voice soft. “Just like you.”

“No,” he says, sure and hurting with the certainty. “I’m not. I’ve done--” he chokes with it, shutting his eyes. “I’ve done a lot of bad things. I’ve done--”

“That’s okay, though, Baby,” Mom says, shaking him a little by the hold she still has on his chin. “We’re what we do, not how we’re born. And I know my boy. I know you’ve only ever done what you had to. To protect your own.” She darts in to kiss him on the forehead, meet his eyes again, her gaze heavy with meaning. “Like I did.”

Because in this world, in other worlds where Palaver failed, it was Mom and Talia and the other adults who’d taken care of things, and Mom who’d come home late more than once with the smell of dirt and blood on her clothes.

“I’m sorry you were alone,” she says then. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stay to teach you before you had to figure it out yourself. What it means to be what we are.”

“I’m not alone,” Stiles says quietly, because that’s the part he never really doubted. “I haven’t been, for a long time.”

She smiles at him. “You’re not my Zim,” she says, kissing him again, “but you’re still my boy. And that’s why you can’t stay here.” She smooths a hand back over his hair, and he feels seven years old again, utterly faithful that Mom can fix everything. “They need you, your Dad and your Derek and your Scott and all of them. And you need to live. Not waste away dreaming of lives that aren’t yours to live.”

It’s not a rebuke, but it feels like one, and he flushes hot with shame. But she just pulls him close, hugs him tight, fierce and sure.

“You need to wake up now, okay? I love you. Remember I always love you.”

“I know,” he says, into her hair, voice breaking. “I know.”

_“Close your eyes, Baby. It’ll be all right.”_

_He closes his eyes._

***

Between one blink and the next she’s gone, and it’s a shock like surfacing from water. He sits up, and he sways, and Derek is there, hands on his arms, holding him steady. His head is pounding like someone drove a spike right through the middle of his skull, and this is a familiar feeling, isn’t it? Just like the headaches he got when spell was failing. Uncannily like.

“I think I’m gonna puke,” he manages to get out, and a bucket is thrust under his face, accompanied by a cool, calloused hand around the back his neck, a touch he recognizes vaguely as Aunt Pearl’s. He guesses there wasn’t much in his stomach, because all that comes up is bile, but it’s still generally pretty horrible.

Eventually he’s done, and the bucket is swept away to be replaced by a plastic cup of water, which he is instructed to “sip, don’t gulp,” and he obeys meekly, swishing the water around his mouth and spitting the first mouthful into the bucket before drinking, because his mouth tastes like… well, like puke. Ugh.

The cold sweat is cooling on his skin and the adrenaline is fading by the time Aunt Pearl steps back and Derek sits down in front of him, hands on his shoulders and gaze intent. “Are you back?” he asks.

Stiles meets his eyes uncertainly. “Yeah, I’m--” He swallows, hard. “Yeah.” He looks around the room; he doesn’t recognize it, but the decor says “cheap hotel.” On the other side of the room, Aunt Pearl stands next to a spectacularly ugly couch on which Gerda is sitting, looking pissed off and defiant. Oh good. Now Stiles can add “humiliated” to the list of current emotions along with “gutted” and “queasy.” “How did you…” Stiles asks, waving a hand vaguely.

“Gerda called us,” Derek tells him. “We got you here.” Over Derek’s shoulder he sees Aunt Pearl pat Gerda approvingly on the shoulder.

“You--” he says, frowning at her, but Gerda is utterly fucking unimpressed, arms crossed over her chest.

“I _told_ you I would,” she says, and she looks tired but nothing like cowed. She’s wearing the same clothes he remembers her wearing when he saw her last, so he can’t have been… uh, out, that long.

“How long was I--”

“Sixteen hours,” Gerda snaps, and yeah, she’s not letting him off the hook for this any time soon. “I thought you were having a seizure. Or, I don’t know, _dead_.”

“I’m fine,” Stiles says, reflexively, and he knows immediately that this was a mistake. Gerda’s face goes from “pissed” to “thunderous.” Beside him, he can feel Derek shift, feel Derek’s anger zinging through him, the way he’s pushing it down, the way it’s being bowled under by sympathy. Tenderness.

“You were dreaming,” says Derek. “One of _those_ dreams.”

With great trepidation, Stiles turns and looks at him. Derek looks at him, brows furrowed, and Stiles can see the way he’s trying not to be mad, trying not to let Stiles see how freaked out he’s been, but they can’t really hide things from each other anymore. Not even things Stiles might really prefer to keep to himself.

“I know you were dreaming because I _saw it_ , Stiles. I know what you were dreaming about.” He squeezes Stiles’ hands, gently, and Stiles can _feel_ him willing him to look up, to look at him. “It’s going to be okay, she--”

“It _isn’t fucking okay,_ ” Stiles says, yanking his hands away from Derek’s. Derek rises, takes one step back, looking stricken, and Stiles immediately feels like a monster.

Pearl looks between them and gets to her feet, slapping a hand against her thigh. “Well, I’m off,” she says, hooking Gerda by the elbow as she heads for the door. “See you boys soon.”

The hotel room door swings shut with a discreet click behind them. Stiles doesn’t watch them go, just stares at his knees, his shoes against the grimy carpet.

“You promised,” Derek says finally. Stiles can’t get a read on his voice, but what he can feel is all terror, frustration. He dares to look up, sees Derek has his arms folded tightly across his chest like he’s holding himself back. “You promised not to go that deep again.”

“I know,” Stiles says, getting up. “I fucked up.”

“Damn it, Stiles, that’s not what I--” Derek says, and then stops, hands reaching out towards Stiles still very human but grasping; the I-wish-I-could-choke-you-with-my-mind gesture Stiles makes when he finds Derek incredibly frustrating. Stiles would find it sweet if not for the circumstances. When Derek raises his hands to his own head instead, clutching at his hair, Stiles turns away, closes his eyes.

“I can’t,” he starts, and just like that he’s exhausted; has to grab at the wall to keep from falling down. He feels more than hears the way Derek has to physically stop himself from rushing across the room to hold him up, turns his head to see Derek standing frozen, rigid, visibly anxious, in the middle of the floor. Stiles turns around and lets himself lean, shoulder blades pressing hard into the wall, watches Derek straighten up, waiting.

“I’m an asshole, okay?”

“ _Stiles_ \--” Derek starts, but Stiles shakes his head.

“No. You don’t get it. When-- when my mom was sick, I couldn’t go anywhere. I couldn’t do anything. I was scared to go to school, because I thought I’d come home and-- I’d wake up in the middle of the night and have to check she was still breathing. I was scared, scared out of my mind, more scared than I’ve been when my actual life was in danger, _all the time_ . It was--” He bites viciously at the inside of his cheek because he feels the hot prickle of tears pressing hard against the backs of his eyeballs, but he doesn’t want to, doesn’t _deserve_ it--

“It was fucked up. I can’t do that again.”

“I understand,” Derek says, still watchful, arms loose at his sides. “Nobody’s expecting--”

“No,” says Stiles, “ _no_ ,” because Derek is trying to forgive him and he _doesn’t_ understand, “that’s the thing. They should be.”

Stiles lets his head thud back against the wall. “I’m not a very good person.”

That finally gets Derek moving, shoulders squaring up, and he looks kind of pissed, actually. “Yes you are.”

Stiles laughs, though it sounds more like a croak. “When we first met you, I was totally on board with killing you, because it was easier.” And it’s cruel, but he has to make Derek _understand_ . “I set a guy on _fire_ before I was seventeen and I slept well that night. I’ve killed at least three people in what was, arguably, cold blood, and I haven’t felt bad about even one of them. And I’m not--”

He can see the words building behind Derek’s stubborn, distressed expression but he waves a hand to head him off. “--I’m not too broken up about any of that, honestly. Because I did it all because… there are people I need to keep. And that let me keep them. Keep - Scott. And Dad. And Lydia. A-and _you_ . I’ve beaten a guy’s head in with a baseball bat, and I’m pretty well at peace with it--” Not the closest he’s gotten to actual cold-blooded murder, but to date the most graphically violent. “--and objectively that’s pretty fucked up, _I’m_ pretty fucked up, but it’s not because of werewolves, or magic or Gerard Argent or fucking _Peter_ . I’m pretty sure I started out that way. I mean, you’ve met Aunt Pearl.” Aunt Pearl, who in her own way is as dangerous a predator as Derek. More so, because she can and has killed for the abstract. Because where Derek just cares, Aunt Pearl _believes._

Stiles trails off, trying not to look at Derek’s face. “I’m not a good person,” he says again, “but that never mattered, because all the shit I’ve done has been for good reasons.” He shrugs. “Good enough. But this doesn’t count.”

“What doesn’t count?” Derek asks, voice soft and careful.

Stiles closes his eyes. “All I wanted to do when I found out she was sick was run as far away as I could as fast as I could go.”

“Stiles, that’s not - that doesn’t make you -”

“I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to see or hear anyone who knows, or who might ask how I am, or how she is, or how Scott is, or Dad, or who might even know something’s wrong. I don’t want to fucking _talk_ to anyone--”

His voice breaks as he kicks, hard, back against the wall, and he feels the wall give a little. “I just want - I don’t want to deal with it. Because it’s too-- she’s not even _my mom,_ ” he says, and there, there it goes, his voice rough and wet, “and I can’t even - Scott was there the whole time, he was there for me but I can’t even - and she’s not even-- what kind of person-- I have _no right_ \--”

And he can’t, he can’t, but he doesn’t have to because Derek is there, pulling him in even though Stiles fights him, kicks and hits and yells; holds on until he quiets, stops fighting, and holds on right back.

It’s not panic he’s feeling, he realizes some time later, when the worst of it has passed but he still can’t quite get his breathing under control. He doesn’t know what it is, but it’s not exactly grief, either. He knows what grief feels like. But his breath keeps coming in little hiccuping sobs, and Derek is still here, still lying next to him on the bed he carried Stiles to when his knees gave out, still holding him close and stroking fingers through his hair, still patiently making reassuring nonsense sounds like he’s been doing for what feels like hours.

“Are you back?” Derek asks eventually, hand still stroking, heartbeat still reassuringly steady. His voice is soft, almost a whisper, and he doesn’t _sound_ worried, only patient, but Stiles can hear the worry anyway.

Stiles considers it, and nods against Derek’s chest. “Yeah,” he rasps, raising an arm to swipe at his eyes with his sleeve. “I think so.”

Derek makes a sound of agreement, pulls back a little to study Stiles’ face. “Hang on,” he says, pulling away just long enough for something in Stiles to get jittery and pathetic, but he’s back almost right away, pulling Stiles up onto the pillows so that they’re not sitting up, but a little more upright than they were.

“Here,” he says, tilting Stiles’ face up a little so his head is cradled in the crook of Derek’s elbow. “Close your eyes.” And Stiles is so wiped out that he does without question. He doesn’t even startle when Derek lays a cool damp cloth over his eyes, smoothing it across his forehead. The gentleness of the touch is almost enough to bring tears to his eyes again, but it seems he’s pretty much wrung out for the moment.

He feels Derek settle back down next to him, pulling him in a little so he’s lying mostly on Derek’s chest, and they lie there like that for a while, until Stiles feels just a little less shocky and tenderized. Derek waits until Stiles has peeled away the cloth before he says anything, eyes careful on Stiles’ face.

“It’s not the same,” he says, voice low. “You know that, right?”

Stiles sniffs, wipes his face with the cloth and lets Derek take it and put it down somewhere out of sight. “It feels the same,” he says. His throat hurts.

“I know,” Derek says, his arm tightening around Stiles, just a little. “That’s okay.”

“But it’s not--”

“There’s nothing wrong with you.” Derek’s voice is still quiet, but it sounds fierce, all the same. “You can’t have feelings _wrong_.”

Stiles looks at him, takes in the strangely peaceful certainty behind Derek’s expression, behind the worry. It’s strange to think that this is Derek - the _real_ Derek, the one who spent years buried under pain and fear and loss, the one just starting to surface again, after years more of care and attention to detail. The Derek who always should have been. Stiles closes his eyes, presses his face to Derek’s chest; Derek’s other arm comes up around him like he was just waiting for a chance.

“It feels selfish.”

“Stiles…” Derek hesitates, and sighs, one hand coming up to cup the back of Stiles head. He sounds tired. “Go to sleep,” he says, instead of whatever he was going to say.

Stiles doesn’t ask.

He’s drifting off, mostly asleep, when he thinks he hears Derek whisper: “You’re the least selfish person I’ve ever met.”

***

“I’m going to see Melissa,” Derek says in the morning, carefully not looking at him. “Do you want to come?”

They drive the distance in silence, which is unusual enough that it makes Stiles even twitchier than he already was. Derek reaches over and curls a hand around the back of Stiles’ neck, warm and easy, and Stiles goes still, the anxiety becoming heaviness, a quieter misery. By the time they’re pulling up at the curb in front of Scott and Allison’s building he’s slumped against the passenger side window. Derek’s hand slides away as he unbuckles his seatbelt; after a moment, he unbuckles Stiles as well.

“You coming?” Derek asks, and it’s so carefully free of judgement that Stiles just shuts his eyes, presses his cheek to the cool glass.

Derek is quiet for another long moment, and then he says “okay,” and gets out of the car. The sound of the door shutting behind him is startlingly loud, but Stiles keeps his eyes closed.

Some time passes. He doesn’t keep track. He knows at some point he’s going to have to get up, get out of the car, go and act like a person. He’s still trying to work up the energy to push past the comfortable barrier of numbness around himself when he senses someone approaching, and then jumps when someone raps on the window right next to his face.

It’s Scott, who is bent over, peering into the car. Stiles sighs, flops back in the seat so Scott can open the door if he wants.

Apparently he does. And then he crouches down next to the car, looks up at Stiles, saying shockingly little. He says “Stiles?” and when he doesn’t get an answer, he sighs. He sounds worried, but patient. Stiles looks at him - can’t avoid it much longer without making it obvious. Scott is just watching him, waiting for… something. Something he expects, that much is clear.

“Stiles,” Scott says again, cocking his head a little to one side, the way he does when he’s listening to something Stiles can’t hear. But his attention is focused on Stiles. Waiting him out. And, _oh_ , Stiles thinks. This is Scott.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, the words choked out of him - he’s not crying; he’s too wrung out for that. He’s got his face in both hands, but Scott’s pulling them away after a second, pulling Stiles out of the car and into a rough hug. Stiles just hangs on, because it’s Scott and Scott is more than strong enough to hold them both up even when Stiles’ limbs aren’t cooperating.

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Scott says. Not an order, not like Stiles is an idiot; just a fact. Like he’s letting Stiles off the hook.

“She says it’s okay,” Scott says then, and Stiles exhales shakily and lets his knees give out, sinks down onto the curb in front of the car. Scott sits down next to him without saying another word.

They sit on the curb outside for a long time. Stiles doesn’t go in.

***

“I’m not sorry,” is the first thing Gerda says, when he tracks her down in the coffee shop on Monday morning. She isn’t, he can see that; her whole body radiates defiance, though she looks a little unsure around the edges.

“I’m not mad,” he says, stirring sugar into the largest coffee the barista would agree to sell him. “I’m not,” he says again, when he looks up and sees the guarded surprise on her face. “You did… you did the only thing you could. And as it turned out it was the only thing that would help. I’m kind of…” he twirls a finger in the air next to his head, “I’m kind of fucked up, but being fucked and magic means that, you know, there’s extra weird shit on top of my normal fucked up stuff, and it could have gotten…” He looks down again.

“Has it happened before?” Gerda asks, and she’s got her hands clenched tight around her mug, tight enough that the skin goes faintly blue-white around the knuckles.

“What, my Sleeping Beauty impression? Yeah, once.” Once, not long after they broke an evil spell and dumped not only a lifetime of memories but the full strength of his magic back into his head. It was a little hard to handle. “Not this bad, but…” He shrugs. “I came back. Derek was… pretty mad, that time.”

“He didn’t seem mad,” Gerda says. “Just… freaked out.”

“Yeah, it was worse this time,” Stiles admits. “I got… lost, I guess. And… look, if I’d been with anybody else when I went down, somebody who didn’t know about my pack, know all the weird stuff, didn’t know to call Derek, I might not have woken up at all. So. You know.” He grins at her, trying very hard to feel it. “Thanks for saving my life and stuff.”

Gerda doesn’t blush, exactly, but her cheeks go a little blotchy, and she smiles into her coffee. When she looks up, she’s frowning. “Don’t ever do that again, though,” she says, with an edge of menace, and he nods.

“I promise.” Which - he promised the last time, too. But he’s pretty sure that whatever confluence of events brought on that last episode, it’s not likely to happen again, not that way.

He still hasn’t seen Melissa, but he’s stopped ducking everybody’s calls, at least. Scott just keeps saying “she’s not mad,” even though the last thing he should be worrying about right now is comforting _Stiles_. It’s not going a long way towards making Stiles feel like less of an asshole.

“Think you’re feeling well enough for a little detective work?” Gerda slides a flyer across the table: an ad for tonight’s LGBTQA Club Crawl.

“Andrew’s back on campus?” he asks, and Gerda nods.

“Got back yesterday,” she confirms, looking a little bloodthirsty. “We can get him, Stiles.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says, thoughtfully, and looks up at her again. “I might need a few fake ID,” he says, a little sheepishly, and she grins at him, a sharp smile.

“Well,” she says, eyes drifting ceilingward, all innocence, “I wouldn’t _personally_ know anything about that business, but I might know someone who knows someone.”

“Is that so?” Stiles says, the grin spreading across his face starting to feel real.

***

Sometimes Stiles wonders if he ever would have actually _liked_ clubbing, if his life hadn’t gone the way it went. He doesn’t hate it, exactly; he got downright fond of The Jungle, back in high school, though that was at least as much because of it being one of very few explicitly queer hangouts in town and the friends he made there as it was the whole clubbing aspect. He likes dancing, too, and the way that doing it in a crowd with a pounding beat lets him lose himself, for a while.

But that’s as much part of the problem as the part he likes, because these days, it’s a lot harder for him to let go without it coming back to bite him on the ass. Being in a crowd of people is usually a cause for shoring up his defenses, because he picks stuff up from other people a lot easier when there’s a lot of them, when they’ve been drinking, when _he’s_ been drinking - not that he does that much, anymore. Clubs are an evening of everybody else’s amplified wants and desires and passing emotional flares battering against his senses like a cloud of moths, and most of the time it’s not worth the aggravation.

They join the society club crawl at their third destination, a gay bar so full of neon that Stiles is actually squinting against the clashing colours as Gerda leads him through the crowd. She seems in her element, a fierceness about her, eyes darting back and forth as she looks for Andrew. They decided it would be easier to track him - or, at least, their target - by scent, given how easily the crowd and the noise confuse what little tracking magic Stiles can work in a press like this. Stiles makes eye contact with Amanita on the other side of the bar and gives her a brief wave, and then Gerda yells something and drops his hand, disappearing into the crowd. He opens his mouth to protest, but closes it again, knowing there’s no point, with the noise level what it is. Instead, he shoulders his way up the bar and buys a bottled water, cracking the top and swigging down half before Gerda returns, frustrated and out of breath.

“I talked to a couple of people who said he definitely came in with the group, but they haven’t seen him in a while,” she says, stealing Stiles’ water and gulping back the rest of its contents. She wipes her mouth, frowning. “He’s here, though. I’m sure he is.”

“I believe you,” Stiles says, scanning the crowd. He’d try magic, but he doesn’t have a good enough read on Andrew to track him easily, not without something that belongs to him, which both Stiles and Gerda forgot to bother trying for when they visited his room a few days ago. He set wards on the doors, though, that should give Stiles a little ping if anybody non-human leaves the club, and so far he’s felt nothing. If Andrew _is_ the “life-taker” they’re after, he’s still in the club.

“We’re looking for two dudes, right?” Gerda says, wedging both feet in the ringed bottom of a bar stool and putting a hand on Stiles’ shoulder for balance so she can hoist herself up, a couple of feet higher than her usual, diminutive height. “Ugh, it’s hard to make out anything in this light.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says, making a face. “Andrew is most definitely _not_ the swings-both-ways type. Actually I think he considers bisexuals just as mythical as mermaids.” Above him, Gerda snorts, but then she’s going stiff.

“There - Stiles, is that him? I think--”

Stiles follows the direction of her pointing arm, squinting against the confusing neon-and-darkness, and-- yes. It _is_ Andrew, dancing with a slim, dark-haired boy who has his eyes closed, his head tipped back against Andrew’s shoulder. He definitely does not look old enough to be in here, but then again, neither are Stiles and Gerda.

Gerda is tugging on his arm, and he follows her as she jumps down and starts eeling her way through the crowd, elbows first but not quite bumping into anyone. They pause about halfway across the floor, and Gerda turns and throws her arms around Stiles’ neck, pulling him into a close, swaying dance. “He’s looking this way,” she says into Stiles’ ear, and Stiles hastily ducks his head, letting Gerda pull him around so he’s got his back to Andrew. “I don’t think he saw,” Gerda says, switching sides so she can peer over Stiles’ shoulder. Then she laughs; it’s not a very nice laugh.

“Damn, I hadn’t noticed. That is so creepy.”

“Huh?”

Gerda shakes her head. “That kid - fuck, he looks maybe sixteen - he looks just like you. I hadn’t realized, but you and Matty look similar at a distance, too.”

Stiles glances, quickly, over his shoulder. “He does _not_ look like me!”

She snorts. “He so does. The creep has definitely got a type-- oh, shit, come on, they’re moving.”

Stiles turns just in time to see Andrew leaning down to whisper into his dance partner’s ear - the boy sways, nodding; he looks drunk. Andrew leads him away, and they disappear through a doorway at the back of the club.

“Shit,” Stiles says, getting a bad feeling. “Come on.”

They push through the crowd as fast as they can, but on the other side of the doorway there’s only a dark, empty hallway with a lit Exit sign at the end. The ward is pinging like crazy at the back of Stiles’ head.

“Where’d they go?” Gerda asks, looking around, and Stiles pushes forward, heading for the exit at a near-run. A _really_ bad feeling.

They burst out into the alley, and there they are. Two figures up against the wall a little ways down the alley, one a little taller than the other, making out languorously. But the figure against the wall is barely on his feet, and if he looks closely, Stiles can see it, now; not quite a glow, but a sort of brightness around Andrew’s body, a bright flare and rush in his other sight, and he’s breaking into a run before he even knows what he’s doing, reaching into his pocket and reaching down into himself for power.

“Hey!” he yells, and the taller figure jerks upright, and yeah, it’s Andrew, eyes strange; there’s a skim of pure black covering his usually brown human eyes, iris and sclera gone; they’re like holes in the air, but they still manage to convey surprise and even fear.

He’s too surprised to offer much of a fight; he takes two steps back, away from the boy he was holding up against the wall, and turns as if to run. Stiles flings out a hand before he can get very far, _pulling_ with all his might, and then, as Andrew starts to topple, he throws down the little glass ampoule from his pocket as hard as he can.  It shatters right at Andrew’s feet. A mix of mountain ash and a few other herbs blossoms out around Andrew, forming into a perfect circle around him even as he falls, senseless, to the ground.

The kid, mostly unconscious, starts to slide down the wall with a moan, but Gerda, right on Stiles’ heels, catches him before can brain himself on the asphalt, easing him down so that he’s slumped against the wall in a sitting position.

Stiles stares, breathing hard, as his heartbeat returns slowly to normal.

“Okay,” says Gerda, eventually, voice a little shaky. “Obviously _you’re_ the one who’s hot shit.”

Stiles laughs, sudden and loud, and then bends over his knees, willing the adrenaline to fade the hell back.

“What now?” asks Gerda, once they’ve ascertained that the unconscious kid is mostly unharmed; Andrew didn’t have a chance to do much damage, it seems, because he’s mostly conscious, just a little wobbly. Probably he’ll dismiss this, in the morning, as too much to drink.

“Now,” Stiles says, pulling out his phone, “we hand this over to the proper authorities.”

***

So one of the stranger outcomes of letting Dad in on the whole guess-what-the-supernatural-world-is-real-and-even-weirder-than-you-would-have-thought secret was that Dad immediately got in gear networking with people in law enforcement across the country who were also in on the secret. Stiles has a list on his phone of local cops - in the cloud, shared with Dad - who can be counted on to leave certain things out of their reports and who know who to call when particularly weird order-keeping problems arise.

Like a twenty-two-year-old incubus who didn’t know he was an incubus and not-so-coincidentally has been sort of accidentally-roofieing undergrads for six months.

Andrew, when he wakes up in the back of the squad car, is intensely freaked out - sweaty and grey-faced and shaking, and not just because Stiles interrupted him in the middle of a meal.

“I didn’t -- I swear to _god_ I didn’t --” he keeps saying over and over again, and Stiles just sighs, shakes his head, and shuts the back door before turning to Detective Mayes, a fifty-three-year-old veteran on the city Force who’s also known Dad since they were rookie unis together, before he moved to Beacon Hills.

“You’re sure they can… you know, help him?” Stiles asks, very carefully not turning around to look at Andrew, who is now audibly sobbing. Gerda, standing beside Detective Mayes, just frowns in his direction.

Detective Mayes shrugs. “Not the first time something like this has come up, apparently. There’s a group down in LA that, well, donates, to folks like this. You know.”

“Oh,” Stiles says, with a vague shudder. “Well. To each their own, I guess.”

“I’m booking him on drunken disorderly and contributing to the delinquency of a minor, but I doubt it’ll stick. It’s the kind of charge we slap on students all the time; mostly we throw ‘em in the drunk tank and give ‘em a scare. But it’ll be enough of a reason for him to withdraw from school for a while - there’s at least one academic advisor on campus who can arrange things to look a lot less suspicious.”

“Will he go to jail?” Gerda asks, eyes fixed on the cruiser window like she thinks Andrew might still make a break for it.

“Hard to say,” Detective Mayes says. “Not like we can book him on, what, ingesting life-force without consent? Maybe sexual assault, but it’d be damned difficult to prove, since you say none of the victims remember anything and the assault wasn’t physical, so no forensics. Besides…” She glances over Stiles’ shoulder and back. “...if it’s true that he didn’t realize what he was doing, the culpability’s a little… hazy.”

Gerda sighs heavily, crossing her arms. “I guess.”

“But they’ll figure that out, in time,” Mayes goes on. There are thick grey streaks through her black hair, and she tucks an escaping bit back into her bun as she pockets her phone. “He’ll be assessed, there’ll be some mandated counselling, I’d expect. They’ll figure it out. And if there are charges to be filed, they’ll figure out how to phrase it in the record. We’ve gotten pretty good at this, young lady,” she says to Gerda, not ungently. “It gets a little grey sometimes, negotiating between this world and the law. But the law still matters.”

Mayes takes Andrew away, and Stiles and Gerda are left standing in the club parking lot.

“I feel like we should go back inside and celebrate,” Gerda says, pulling her coat tighter around her body, “but…”

“Kind of want to just go back to your room and sleep for a million years?” Stiles guesses. “Yeah. Me too.”

It’s a longish walk back to campus, but it’s quiet, the sound of bars and pubs and clubs always a few streets away, the night cold and bright under a waxing moon. They don’t meet a single soul, and even once they step onto the campus it’s all but deserted. Gerda seems unusually subdued, shoulders hunched up around her ears, but there’s a tension missing that he’s gotten used to seeing since he met her - met her again - that day in the coffee shop.

“I know it’s weird,” he ventures. “That they can’t just arrest him. But…”

“No, I get it,” she says, shaking her head. “I’m glad we stopped it; stopped him. That’s what really matters, I know that.”

“So what’s the matter?”

She shrugs. “I was thinking about Andrew, actually,” she says. “I just… it seems so crazy that he really had no idea what he was doing to all those people.”

“I think he was getting an idea,” Stiles says dryly, “even if he didn’t understand it.”

“But you were right, before,” Gerda insists. “You were right, when you said it was easier than I thought to… to not know. You didn’t know.” Stiles looks at her, quickly, to find her looking at him with uncomfortable shrewdness. “That’s what you meant, wasn’t it?”

“I was thinking of my friend Scott, too,” he admits, “but yeah.” He didn’t know. For a long, long time, he had no idea what he was. Where he’d come from. “I maybe wasn’t going around putting people into comas, but… it was hard, to find out. Even though by the time I figured out about _me_ the rest of it, the hey, by the way, werewolves! supernatural beings! part was pretty well beaten into my head. It’s…” He looks at Gerda, carefully, because she’s looking at him like she can see right through him. “It’s hard to accept something like that, about yourself, especially when it means you… aren’t who you thought you were.”

They’re at his dorm by now, and Gerda’s isn’t much farther, so they stop, and to his surprise, she throws her arms around his neck and hugs him tight.

“Thank you,” she says, and he hugs her back.

“All part of the service,” he answers, and goes up to find his bed.

He thinks tonight he might even be able to sleep.

***

_The moon is full, but it’s everywhere instead of a single bright light. Moonlight falls in pools and ripples on the ground, broken up by branches and interspersed with deep, deep shadow. Stiles holds up a hand, watches the play of light and dark across his skin; it’s like watching sun fall through water. His head falls back as he looks up, up, up at the tree; at the trunk so big that all of the kids together couldn’t get their arms around, at the branches reaching out and up like the beams of a church._

_Behind them, the others follow them through, the rowdy kids going quiet. Laura’s been here before, because she’s the oldest and she’s going to be Alpha one day, but for the others, it’s the first time. They got to come because Stiles got to come, because it’s important that he knows, that the pack is a part of it._

_Talia comes to stand close, shoulder touching Mom’s, and they look at each other and grin, quicksilver and secretive, and Stiles feels a sudden surge of inexplicable joy that makes him giggle, makes Mom laugh and pull him close with her other arm._

_He’s not old enough to do the magic, yet, but he’s allowed to stand close enough to watch. Closer than the others, who stand at a respectful distance, closer to the treeline. Close enough to see Mom and Ms. Talia join hands again, see Mom’s little silver knife flashing in the moonlight as she draws it across the meaty base of her thumb, across the palm of Ms. Talia’s hand. Neither woman even flinches, and Mom’s motions are quick and easy like she’s done this many times before. He’s close enough to see as they bring their hands up to press against the trunk of the tree,  to feel the way the air around them shivers and then hums, to see the crawling specks of light spreading from where Mom and Ms. Talia’s hands are pressed to the bumpy-smooth bark. It almost feels like too much, like it’s going to fill him up and overflow, shine out through his eyes and his mouth even as it races out across the bark of the tree, up and up and up and then out, into the night, and that’s all he remembers._

***

Stiles’ phone is on vibrate, fortunately, so that when it wakes him, Rashid doesn’t stir. He grabs it up along with a hoodie, pulling it over his head as he steps out into the corridor and answers the phone.

“Hey,” he says, and on the other end, Derek lets out a breath he sounds like he’s been holding for a while.

“Are you okay?” Derek asks, and Stiles can feel him, feel how unsure he is.

Stiles doesn’t answer right away. “I don’t know,” he finally says. “Caught a bad guy tonight. That’s not nothing.”

“Your dad told me,” Derek admits. Stiles isn’t even surprised, anymore, when he catches Derek and Dad keeping tabs on him from a distance. These days he finds it almost comforting. “I’m proud of you,” Derek adds, and Stiles sighs, leans back against the wall.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and it could be for a lot of things. He doesn’t think Derek will be picky.

“I wasn’t mad,” Derek tells him, gently. “Not at you. I was worried. I was… I don’t like when you’re hurting.”

“It wasn’t your fault either,” Stiles mumbles, rubbing at his face.

“But there wasn’t anything I could do to help,” Derek tells him, sounding frustrated, “and that’s just as bad.”

“I know,” Stiles agrees. “But you do help. You help all the time.” He sinks down to sit against the wall, the furthest corner from any doors, near the stairwell. It’s late enough nobody’s likely to come by. “You’re there.”

Derek doesn’t say anything, but Stiles can feel how pleased he is: a surge of warmth along the connection between them.

“I had a dream tonight,” Derek says, after a while. He’s hesitant, in a way that’s unlike him, and that’s when Stiles remembers his own dream. “I think… I think it was yours.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s never been that clear before,” Derek says, and Stiles can hear him closing a door, settling down; rustling. He’s probably getting back into bed after walking around the house checking the locks like he always does when he’s woken in the middle of the night.

“No,” Stiles agrees, thinking back. He doesn’t think he’s remembered it in this much detail before, either. Then he sits up straight. “Derek. Is Aunt Pearl still there?”

“Uh,” Derek is surprised. “Yes. She doesn’t leave until Sunday. Why?”

Stiles does some quick mental math. He’ll just have to hand in a paper early, that’s all. “Look, I’ll be home on Friday, okay? Tell her - you know what, no, I’ll call her myself. I’ve got to go.” He pushes himself up and starts walking back to his room.

“Stiles, what are you--” Derek is puzzled, but not alarmed; he can tell too easily that Stiles isn’t upset, just distracted.

“It’s okay. I’ll explain everything on Friday. I’ve just… I’ve got an idea.”

“Okay,” Derek says, obviously still not sure what the hell is going on, but willing to go along with it. “I’ll see you Friday.”

“Okay. And-- Derek?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

There’s a long, shocked pause, and for a second Stiles thinks he’s fucked up, but then he feels the warmth blossoming between them, feels Derek’s astonished gratitude, and it’s enough to have him grinning like an idiot even before Derek replies: “I love you, too.”

***

He skips his class on Friday morning and drives home, the trip uneventful. It’s a strangely solitary journey, as though he’s small and alone on a vast grey sea. It’s different as he approaches the borders of the town, and some part of him expects to see a wolf pacing the Jeep as he drives over the invisible line and the Preserve rises up around him. He catches himself glancing over to the side of the road more than once, and can’t quite put a finger on the feeling when he realizes what he’s doing: regret? No, not quite.

When he pulls into the driveway, the house looks strange, too, and he sits in the Jeep for long minutes, wondering why. Eventually it hits him that the shutters and window borders are painted dark green instead of blue; the window boxes are empty, not overflowing with rock cress and bishop’s weed; the mailbox is dingy white tin instead of carved dark wood. A dozen little details seem wrong - or, well, not _wrong,_ just… not what he was expecting. The last time he saw this house, the house he grew up in, was in a dream of another world where things went very differently.

Not bad. _His._ He knows that, down in his bones. But it’s jarring, to say the least, and he has to close his eyes and put his head down against the steering wheel for a minute before he can get out of the car without feeling dizzy.

There’s no one in the house, he can feel that, but as he circles around the back, he can hear low voices. Derek and Aunt Pearl are sitting on the back porch, mugs of something hot and steaming in their hands. The sun is bright, but there’s a sharp chill in the air, one Derek doesn’t seem to notice but Aunt Pearl has apparently decided to defy by wrapping herself in the old patchwork quilt from the guest room.

He’s sure they feel him coming, hear him coming, but neither of them looks up until he’s nearly within touching distance, at which point Derek sets down his mug and opens his arms just in time for Stiles to all but fall into them. It’s really no more dramatic than that, the two of them standing there wrapped up so tight in each other that Stiles can’t tell where his heartbeat ends and Derek’s begins, but the little smile on Aunt Pearl’s face as she gazes out over the yard, towards the woods, is disproportionately smug anyway.

Derek lets him go eventually, steps back enough to rest his forehead against Stiles’.

“I’m sorry,” Stiles says, softly.

“It’s okay,” Derek tells him, honestly, and Stiles shakes his head. He starts to say _it’s not, no, not really, not even a little,_ but Aunt Pearl clears her throat, interrupting them.

“I found your book, smart boy,” she says, and bless her, because a distraction is exactly what Stiles needed.

***

“It took some doing, let me tell you,” Aunt Pearl says, as she opens to about halfway a book so large it takes the strength of her whole forearm to shift it. None of them wanted to retreat into the dim interior of the house, so they’re huddled around the picnic table on the deck, Aunt Pearl still wrapped in her blanket and Derek pressed up close to Stiles’ side like a living hot water bottle.

The book is dark, wine-red leather, not unlike the much smaller leatherbound book Stiles carries, that Aunt Pearl carries, Mom carried. Aunt Pearl scoffed the one time he called it a spellbook, but she’s never suggested a proper name for what their particular flavour of witchcraft calls them. She always simply calls hers “my book.”

It’s an object of power, though, that much is unquestionable. As Aunt Pearl lifts the cover, the cool morning light catches the symbol pressed deep into the leather; not just their family sigil, the leaves and berries of a sprig of mistletoe, but the more elaborate Vaytsiushkevich coat of arms, with the Cyrillic version of their family name spelled out underneath. The cover falls open with a thud, and the wash of residual magic wafts out over them with the motion of the air. Derek twitches, and then sneezes. Stiles only shivers. Aunt Pearl squints for a moment, until it’s dissipated, and then she squints down at the open pages instead.

“This was your great, great, great… well. You know. Many back, your great-grandmother’s,” she says, now turning pages, inspecting them closely. The writing is a mix of Cyrillic and English script, all messy cursive that Stiles can barely make head or tails of. Aunt Pearl is studying it closely, lips moving silently, so presumably it makes sense to her. “It goes back to around the time Beacon Hills was founded.”

She pauses, flips back a few pages, and then forward again, and then she stops, smoothing the pages flat. “More than a few Hales mentioned in here, too,” she says, turning the book around so that Stiles and Derek, sitting across from her at the table, can see.

Stiles still can’t make sense of most of the text, but one thing is unambiguous: the sketch of a vast tree sprawling across much of the page. Not the same tree he dreamed, saw, but similar.

Next to it, and crowded close by handwritten text, is the smaller sketch of a smaller tree, or rather, a sapling; he can tell its relative size because it’s depicted in a pair of cupped hands, soil spilling over the edges.

There are other things that he can make out, here and there: symbols, scrawled lines of flowing text he can tell, from the context, are cantrips; memory tricks used for memorizing spells for those who need to speak such things aloud. Under the cluster of sketches is a date in ordinary numbers, careful, grandmotherly cursive that doesn’t match the rest of what’s on the page. Someone else wrote this, and yes, it’s as Aunt Pearl said: around the time the town was founded. Under the numbers is a cramped signature: a name beginning with an A and a definite “Hale” at the end. A tiny triskele is inscribed in the lower corner of the page like an afterthought.

“Annabel,” breathes Derek. “Annabel Hale.” He looks up at Aunt Pearl, who’s nodding, and then at Stiles. “She was the first Hale Alpha to claim this territory, I don’t even know how many generations back.” He looks down at the page again, gently touching the name with his fingertips.

On the next page over, there are more drawings, more writing. But the part that catches his eye is a section of text in what looks like list form. He tries to make it out, but Aunt Pearl’s index finger comes down next to the top item.

“It’s a magical contract, of a sort,” she explains. “The sort of thing you record when you work a great enchantment.”

Stiles nods. He remembers Aunt Pearl and Doctor Deaton making him painstakingly record each step when he created the wards on the town, the Preserve, before he left for school in September. How it worked, how to maintain it; how to fix it if it went wrong.

“This one is… well.” Aunt Pearl slumps a little. “It’s a doozy. Something set in motion over two centuries ago, and for all intents and purposes, still humming along.”

“What does it say?” Stiles says, still trying to decipher the mix of scripts, the messy handwriting.

“Generally speaking, it’s a renewal ritual,” says Aunt Pearl, drawing the blanket around herself more tightly. “Here: _On the day of renewal, at the full of the moon, each year must be given an offering; one of the worker, and one of the wolf._ ” She bends over the page again for a moment, lips moving silently again, and shrugs. “It goes on like that. _And from this binding may come a…_ there’s no direct translation. It’s a bit like… wall, or fortress. But then it’s all about _may it be as a sheltering arm, a bright shadow…_ bloody poetry. No point to that, makes for piss-poor documentation… well.” She sits back again. “I think this is what you’ve been sensing, Zim.”

“But what _is_ it?” Stiles bursts out, because in all of this she still hasn’t explained what, exactly, the spell on the page is meant to renew.

Aunt Pearl studies him for a long moment, but then, to Stiles’ surprise, she looks at Derek. “What do you know about nemetons, young man?”

 _Oh_.

Derek looks as surprised as Stiles feels. He looks puzzled, too, and for a moment he looks far away, thoughtful; searching his memory. “You mean… grandmother trees?” He shrugs, glancing at Stiles. “That was what we always called them.”

“Wolves usually do,” Aunt Pearl agrees. “Every culture with a hint of magic has their own word, just like everything else. _Nemeton_ is the Druidic word - not that they invented it, of course, but they had a habit of claiming every damn thing they came across as their own. So _nemeton_ is a word plenty of people know, even if they don’t know anything about magic, and if they don’t know that they know the Druids worshiped trees.”

Aunt Pearl makes a dismissive noise and leans her elbows on the table. “They didn’t, of course. Not quite. Not a lot of genuine workers do a lot of worshiping, at least not in the way ordinary people mean it. Most workers are too in touch with living things to contemplate what lies beyond. No; what puffed-up bloody archaeologists call ‘worship’ they probably thought of in much more practical ways. Then again…” she flips the page back, looks down at the drawing of the tree, and looks thoughtful, “sometimes the most ordinary, practical things have a way of burying themselves deep in who and what you are, becoming sacred just by dint of having always been there. Not unlike your wolf, in that way.”

Derek is frowning, nearly the expression he wears when he’s almost figured something out, but not quite.

 So this… isn’t Druidic,” Stiles says, drumming his fingers on the table. “But it’s similar.”

“Oh, there are Druidic elements to it, or at least, elements drawn from the same body of knowledge.” Aunt Pearl taps the page near Annabel Hale’s scrawl. “That’s hardly surprising; the Hale family sprang from the British Isles. Most shifter families have their own little magics, though they’re often not much more sophisticated or powerful than what regular folks can manage.” She tips her head in Derek’s direction as if to say _no offense_ , but Derek just shrugs.

“Their access to their own magic is tied much more deeply to the shift, so there aren’t many shifter witches,” Aunt Pearl continues, “which is why, in large, established packs, there is often a traditional relationship with worker families.”

“Oh,” Stiles says, the realization dawning, at last. “Like ours. Like us and the Hales.”

“Just like.” Aunt Pearl nods. “It goes back at least as far as the claiming of this territory. And at that time, a Hale and one of our ancestors got together and built something to order… something that, these days, is vanishingly rare.”

Derek places his hand on the page, carefully, thumb and forefinger framing the smaller picture of the sapling cupped in a pair of hands. “You’re saying… there’s a grandmother tree in our territory.” He looks up, meets Aunt Pearl’s eyes, and when Stiles looks at his face, he looks utterly astonished. “But how could it be there without us knowing?”

Aunt Pearl doesn’t answer; just rubs a hand across her mouth, eyes on the page. “What’s the _other_ first thing that springs into your mind when you think about the Druids?”

It’s a question for them both, and they look at each other, and Stiles is sure they have the same answer. “Stonehenge,” he ventures, and Derek nods.

“Right,” says Aunt Pearl, “because the other thing the Druids are known for is building vast and powerful spells inside great big bloody rocks. Which is clever, in the short-term, because you can pour a lot more power into a stone and not worry about overloading it or doing much more harm than it exploding in your face if it goes too far; no falling birds, no babies born wrong, no hurricanes or floods. But it’s incredibly bloody shortsighted because spelled stones are still _dead_ \- they can’t maintain themselves, and they can’t be left alone.”

“The power fades,” Stiles remembers. He hasn’t done a lot of spelling of inanimate objects, but he remembers his disappointing first attempts. Wasted time, in his opinion.

“If you’re _lucky_ , and it doesn’t seep out and warp everything in range,” Aunt Pearl agrees, scornfully. “Add to that, enough power in one place gets… well, not alive, exactly, but just alive enough that when it’s gone, things feel… wrong. Like it goes a bit… mad.” She shudders. “Take my advice and never visit Stonehenge. That’s a headache I could have lived without.”

Stiles remembers when he first explained his plan for warding the town; explaining to Derek that it would be tied to the pack as much as the land; that it would grow stronger with every new person keyed into the spell; how it was about living beings under its protection rather than the bounds of walls or lines on a map. He remembers the look Deaton gave him when he first began to spin out his ideas, plan the spell from the ground up, like he was seeing something he’d never expected to see. All of Stiles’ protection wards up to that point, at least the ones that weren’t tied to a particular person, had been the physical kind - lines on the ground, actions requiring physical interaction. But the town wards had been created for precisely the opposite reason: to outlive Stiles himself. To protect the town, and everyone in it, so long as anyone he’d ever loved remained; anyone _they’d_ ever loved.

He looks down at the page again, at the little triskele sketched carefully in at the bottom corner, and wonders if maybe he hasn’t been following in other footsteps all along, retracing a path laid out for him generations before he was even born.

“If there was a grandmother tree - a nemeton - something like that created from the bond between our family and the Hales… the chances are it would have been keyed to the pack, not a specific person,  right?”

Aunt Pearl nods. “That’s the traditional method,” she says, “not that many such workings remain, at least not in this country.” She looks thoughtfully down at the page, her face almost sad. “So many of them have been lost, or abandoned, or withered away when the families they were built around died out.” She doesn’t look at Derek, but Derek’s jaw tightens for a second.

Aunt Pearl looks up again. “Living things don’t last, but in a way that’s what gives them so much power; the more mortal you are, the brighter you burn. And there’s a sort of immortality we have that true immortals can’t touch: Families. Packs.” Now she does look at Derek, and he meets her eyes again, steadily, though Stiles can feel him trembling, just a little.

“We don’t live forever,” says Aunt Pearl, gently, at least for her, “but we go on.”

Under the table, Derek’s other hand gropes for Stiles, and Stiles grabs it and holds on tight.

“So if the tree was created as a - a what, a locus of power? Protection? Hundreds of years ago.” Stiles tips his head back, chasing the thought as it gains traction in his mind. “And it was tied to Hale Pack, and Hale Pack was suddenly gone, or diminished, or… or out of reach. I mean, there were still Hales left. They just… weren’t here. And it would know that, right?” He squeezes Derek’s hand again, apologetically, and he feels Derek’s sadness, but it’s no more than that. Nothing extreme. “Would it… die? Or would it… I don’t know… go to sleep? And… wait.” Stiles looks at the page, at Aunt Pearl, who’s looking at him intently, now.

“For the pack to come back,” Derek says, voice soft.

“For it to be strong again,” Stiles says, nudging him with his shoulder. “For things to balance out.”

“And not just the pack,” Derek says, nudging him back. “You started having those dreams about the forest after we broke the spell,” he points out, when Stiles just frowns at him in confusion.

“No,” Stiles says, slowly, “it was right after I built the wards… and then _left them._ ” Left them, to settle into place. To work their way deep down to where something else, something  much older, was sleeping.

At least until he started pouring magic into the land; reinforcing the bonds of Hale Pack, between his blood and Derek’s, sending power coursing through channels long ago gone dry.

“It would have been a simple enough defense to build in at the beginning,” Aunt Pearl murmurs. “Safer than something that needed a single living custodian. No Alpha of the right pack? No witch of the proper  bloodline? Go to sleep and hope things look better in the morning.” She looks up at Stiles again, eyes sad, their usual twinkle dimmed. “Both gone in the space of a few months? Fade away, not only from sight, but from living memory.”

She looks vaguely over their heads. “I wonder if I knew about it, before.” She sighs. “I’m sure Sarah did. At least some of those marks were only years old, not centuries,” she says, referring to the sigils carved into the trees bounding that strange old shadowed place in the Preserve.

“Mom,” Stiles whispers, to himself, but Derek leans into him a little, offering comfort.

It helps, even though he’s getting very tired of having his memory tinkered with. Maybe he never knew; in this world, things were different, so he might not have.

The tree is the same, though; the old almost-mind, the plurality of its memories, at least the way he remembers it from his dreams. In the waking world, he’s never seen it, never touched it, even though it’s been reaching for him, little by little, for months now; sleeping, but not gone.

He can feel it now, if only distantly; distinguish it from the tangle of pack and family and Derek. It’s distinct and powerful, _aware_ if not quite sentient, as if just putting a name to it, a shape, has made it easier to touch.

A deep well, long-hidden in the deep shadows under the trees, just waiting for them to notice; for the time to be right.

***

The first thing Stiles ever learned about magic, at least, about their family’s magic in particular, was that balance is key. Without balance, power cannot flow. Without balance, everyone is blinded by searing brightness or stumbling in the dark.

A working like a nemeton - a grandmother tree - could not last without balance.

But their ancestors were clever, building contingencies into the spell. Stiles appreciates contingencies. He lives by contingencies. Contingencies, and contingencies for the contingencies, are how he made it through high school without having a full-on nervous breakdown. It’s basically his personal motto: don’t just be prepared, be _over-prepared_. Maybe it doesn’t always make any concrete difference, but it makes him feel better.

Apparently it’s a tendency he came by honestly.

The all-or nothing thing? That’s Mom, all the way to the ground. He cares about something, or he doesn’t. If he cares, he cares too much. He’s known this about himself for years; it’s just never been brought home to him what that would mean, when caring was just… too fucking hard. Not since he got old enough to take conscious responsibility for any of it.

Baby with the bathwater, apparently. He remembers Mom saying that to him once, voice fond and exasperated. He’d been writing a book report, on some terrible, terrible book whose title he can no longer remember; only that it made no sense, and that seven-year-old him was struggling, and he’s not sure, now, whether it was really the book or his brain or his meds or all three. Only that he threw the book, his half-finished report, his pencil case, and everything else across the room and stomped away. “ _Baby with the bathwater,”_ Mom murmured as she gathered it up, shaking her head, and stacked it all neatly on the kitchen table before following him out into the yard. She came up behind him and flattened her palm on the top of his head, bending down over him to kiss his forehead as he scowled out over the grass.

 _“Sometimes the best you can do is your best, Baby,”_ he remembers her saying. “ _Life’s not all or nothing. That would be easy._ ”

He’s wished, more than once in his life, that he could stop caring about things. Put them aside. Other people seem to manage it, but then other people have degrees that he’s never been able to manage. He can’t stop, which is why he’s been hunched on the curb outside the McCall house for nearly forty-five minutes now, one foot bouncing up and down, head bowed, hands hanging between his knees. Every so often he’ll get up, pace a few steps down the sidewalk towards the house, and then pace back. In forty-five minutes he’s gained maybe two feet on approach. He knows it’s bullshit but he’s counting that as progress.

He’s working himself into a froth, as Aunt Pearl would say, and he knows it - which is probably why he doesn’t hear the front door open behind him.

“You’re making me dizzy, kid,” says Melissa’s voice, and he leaps to his feet fast enough that he nearly loses his balance. “And I’m on kind of a lot of drugs today. Have pity.”

She’s wrapped in a bathrobe, one crutch under her arm, hair caught up in a messy knot on the top of her head, and she looks tired. He instantly feels guilty, for making her get up, for waking her up, for _bothering her_ , and a dozen other things besides.

But she’s known him his entire life, and she sees every single one of them.

“Get over here,” she says, pointing at the porch at her feet, and he goes.

His heart’s beating like crazy, and he’s shaking, but it’s all low-level, pushed down, the kind of thing he’s used to feeling when they’re about to take on some fucked-up creature of the night bent on violently murdering them all. He’s objectively aware that that’s _crazy_ , but at the same time, it all seems like a perfectly reasonable reaction to walking up to the McCall porch where Melissa is standing with a bandage around her leg, wearing a fuzzy purple bathrobe. Some part of his mind wonders what the fuck he expects to happen, seriously, it’s _fine_ ; the bigger part of him is just…

Melissa grabs him by the shoulder when he gets close enough, and he flinches, but she ignores it, pushing him down onto the bench next to the front door and grabbing him by the back of the neck to force his head down between his knees. Like that, it’s reflex to breathe, to count, and he barely registers Melissa maneuvering around him, sinking down onto the bench at his side, propping up her crutch against the wall.

“Sorry,” he manages at last, pressing his fists into his eye sockets. “I didn’t--”

“Breathe,” Melissa orders. “Do not apologize.” And this is familiar, too - the hard plastic chairs in the hallway outside Mom’s room, the first time Stiles had a panic attack in front of anyone who know what was happening - Melissa’s hands and Melissa’s voice, knowing exactly what to do.

The dissonance makes his stomach swoop unpleasantly, but only for a second, and then Melissa’s hand lands on his back between his shoulderblades, circling firmly, and reflex takes over.

When she lets him sit up, he’s relatively calm again, though unpleasantly chilled and clammy; a cold sweat has sprung up all over his skin, and he feels like he’s been dropped from a great height, but he can turn and look at her without feeling the instinctive urge to duck like something’s about to come swinging at his head.

She reaches out and tilts his face into the light, frowning at him with clinical interest, and he lets her. “You gonna pass out?” she asks. “Your pupils are still pretty dilated.”

Stiles blinks rapidly as though it was a criticism. He takes stock, but shakes his head. “I don’t think so.” His voice sounds pretty bad, too. He swallows. “Sorry,” he says.

“What did I just say?” she demands, squeezing the back of his neck, her other hand dropping to his wrist to take his pulse - her own reflex.

He almost apologizes again, but her face softens. “Honey, I told you it was okay. You didn’t have to come.”

He looks away, afraid that if she sees the shame and guilt he’s sure light across his face, she’ll call him on it. “Yeah, I did.”

She makes him look at her again, fingers cool and dry around his chin. “I don’t want you making yourself sick just because you think you’re supposed to,” she says, not quite gently, but kindly.

“I’m not--” he starts, but stops, because - yeah, there was a minute there where puking was a possibility. It’s better now, though. A little.

“Uh huh,” she says, and lets him go. He can feel her staring at him, feel the consideration, the quality of her silence and the weight of her trying to figure out how to say what she wants to say. Maybe the pack bonds are picking up on her at last, and maybe it’s him, or maybe he’s just used to Melissa McCall delivering uncomfortable news.

“I told you all the truth, you know,” she says eventually. “I’m going to be fine. Better than just statistically,” she adds, cutting him off when he takes a breath to speak. “Just heard back this morning. Biopsy’s clean. Just…” She makes a wobbly hand-gesture. “...a lot of pills, for a while. To make sure. You know the drill.”

Stiles nods. He does know. The others have been very careful about keeping him in the loop without actually mentioning what’s going on. He’d be grateful if it didn’t make him feel so shitty and useless.

“And if I wasn’t fine,” she goes on, folding her hands in her lap, “there are other options.”

It takes him a second to get it, the weight she lays on “options,” the way she waits for him to look at her again, and he knows there are tears in his eyes because she reaches out and grabs his hand. “Oh,” she says, surprised, “oh, honey, I’m sorry. I thought you knew.”

He shakes his head, even though he _should_ have known. Even though he did, sort of. Of course Derek offered. It’s tradition, when there are humans in a pack. He should know it from his might-have-beens even if Derek hadn’t sat him down a long time ago and had exactly that conversation with him. _“A no is okay,”_ he said, _“but I have to offer. And ask whether… if there was no other way, to, to save you--”_ It was junior year, and they were only just starting to be friends, really, and Derek never said the rest, just looked away, throat working. That was the first time, probably, that Stiles reached out and grabbed his hand. Back then, it was the only way they touched, much, outside of practice sessions in the woods or life-and-death situations. Back then, Stiles wasn’t sure if it was so hard to ask because Derek didn’t like the idea of losing them so soon after having found them, or because the words were surely ones he was reciting from memory, from having heard his mother say them.

 _“Of course,”_ Stiles said, as much because he hated that look on Derek’s face as because it was true. _“Of course, if there’s no other way. Don’t be stupid.”_

“Scott made me promise, a long time ago,” she tells him, holding his hand in both of hers, squeezing hard. “And even if he hadn’t…” Melissa has always been practical. And just because some for other Melissa, in some other world, the Bite wouldn’t take, that doesn’t mean the same thing would be true here.

Stiles closes his eyes, lets himself slump back against the bench, for several long breaths, because that means… Dad, too.

“I guess I… forgot,” he says, and he knows it sounds stupid, even as he says it.

“It’s okay,” she says, and she’s got that clinical look on her face again, eyes narrowed a little. “It’s pretty much what I’d expect, to be honest.”

“What do you mean?” Stiles pulls his sleeve over his hand long enough to wipe at his sweaty face, the back of his neck. He feels like he needs three showers, or to run ten miles.

“Kid…” she sighs, and Stiles looks at her again, at her determined expression, at the way she reaches out and wraps her fingers around his wrist. “You walked up here like you were heading to the gallows. And then you nearly vomited out of panic - when’s the last time it got that bad?”

Stiles shrugs, not quite daring to pull his wrist free, but suddenly really, really wanting to. It’s been a long time, though, which she surely knows.

“It’s not that uncommon,” she says slowly, “for someone who’s lost a loved one to a terminal illness - especially a parent--”

“I’m fine,” he says, the fingers on the hand she’s got trapped opening and closing spasmodically.

“No, you’re not,” she says, surprisingly fervent. She lets go of his wrist, but puts the same hand on his shoulder instead. Her voice softens, and she squeezes. “You’re coping. And good for you. You’re doing a bang-up job of _coping_ but coping is not the same thing as _being okay._ ” Stiles swallows, hard, wishes he was anywhere else, because he knows that, but it’s easier not to know, most of the time.

“Stiles, look at me,” Melissa says, and he can’t not. She looks so tired, her skin a little waxy, and he shouldn’t be here, bothering her when she should probably be resting. Her eyes catch his, though, the way they’ve always been able to grab his attention and hold it. Sometimes, when he was a kid, it was comforting. “Memory loss. Avoidant behaviour. Intense distress - sweating, nausea, rapid pulse… sound familiar?” She might as well be ticking things off on her fingers, but her hand stays where it is, firmly on his shoulder. He can’t look away.

“I’ve seen it a hundred times, and I’m seeing it now,” she says, “and I’m sorry I didn’t say anything until now, because I should have. I know I’m not your mom but I am a nurse and I’ve been at least occasionally your caregiver, and you were a kid and you’re still a kid and someone should have done something, said something, something _more_.” She’s angry, really angry, and ashamed, and he can feel that, and it baffles him.

“It’s okay--”

“It’s _not_ ,” she says, her other hand slapping against the bench. Then she makes a fist on her knee, shakes her head. When she continues, her voice is gentle again, undeniable. “It’s not. You know it’s not.”

He presses his lips together, drops his eyes to his hands, which are clenched in his lap. “Yeah,” he says, quietly, because he’s known that for a while. Known it beyond the threat of the moment and _worry-about-it-tomorrow_ and making sure everybody else was okay, because that was what mattered. He’s known it since he was twelve, hating the therapist the social worker brought him to because Dad was too messed up to drive him the first couple of weeks. He’s known it since he realized the deep, dark pit of anger that seemed like all there was to sustain him wasn’t just because he was a kid, and his mom died, and it took a long time, and he watched it happen, and he wasn’t the same after. He’s known it better since the spell was broken and he realized that the sense of roaring injustice that’s dogged his every step since he was nine wasn’t just an irrational human protest of betrayal against an unfeeling universe.

Known it wasn’t normal to be more scared of walking up to a house than to take on any of a dozen actual fucking monsters bent on tearing him limb from limb.

“When was the last time you talked to somebody?” Melissa asks, calm like she’s asking about how many refills he’s got left on a prescription, and it works, because he answers without thinking.

“The last day they made me,” he says, bitterly, and shrugs. “It sucked.”

“I know,” she says, and her hand rubs through his hair, drops back to his shoulder, down to his hand, unclenching his fingers. “I know it did.”

“It just made it feel worse,” he says to their joined hands, not wanting to say that it felt like the therapist was reaching inside him and pulling out things that came into the light dark and dripping and painful. That seems a little graphic for someone on meds with nausea side-effects, even if she is a nurse. But at the time, making it sound like the kind of torture he’d only seen in comic books made him feel better about dreading it so much.

“Is it worse right now?” Melissa asks him, and she’s figured something out, he can tell from her tone.

To his own surprise, he shakes his head. “No,” he tells her. “Not right now. But you…” he shrugs with one shoulder, “...you already know. All the bad stuff.”

“Hmm,” she says, considering. “Okay.”

And suddenly she’s standing, reaching for her crutch, and hobbling into the house. He’s stunned for a moment, but she’s not gone much longer than that, back with a bottle of Gatorade and an address book. She hands him the bottle, sits back down, and starts scribbling on a back page.

“I’ve had to make all kinds of weird new connections in the medical community since all this happened,” she says, flipping through the book, scribbling, and flipping again. She glances up at him, finds him staring with his mouth open, and jerks her chin at the bottle. “Drink,” she orders, and doesn’t look away until he cracks the cap and takes a few sips.

“Surgeons who know how to work around accelerated healing, for instance. Pediatricians familiar with what we’d have to call _atypical_ childhood illnesses. My little black book is a lot stranger than it used to be. But it’s mostly made up of people who know the background of… well, you know.” Stiles nods, taking another sip and trying to make out what she’s writing. The Gatorade is helping; his stomach feels a little more settled, at least.

“Dad said the same thing,” he says. He didn’t know Melissa was doing the same kind of networking, but it makes sense.

She nods, and then tucks her pen away, tearing out the page she’s been writing on before tucking the address book, too, away in one of the pockets of her robe. She folds the paper in half and looks at him, and he feels pinned, the plastic bottle crinkling in his hand as he squeezes.

“I’m not going to make you do anything, kid,” she says slowly. “You’re technically an adult now, and anyway it wouldn’t help. Making you feel more helpless would just make you feel worse, in the long run.” She taps the corner of the paper against the bench, _tap-tap-tap_. “And hell, just being able to admit there’s a problem is a hell of a big step, and I’m proud of you.” She bumps her knuckles gently against his knee. “But I think you know that it’s not all the way, and I think you know that you might not be able to get where you need to go on your own. If you could, you’d have done it by now. You’ve always been way too capable for your own good. I still remember the time you broke your wrist falling out of that damn treehouse and didn’t tell anyone.”

He remembers that, too. Melissa and Dad were furious with him, though in his defense he didn’t know it was actually broken. When it swelled up to grapefruit size, the jig was up, and he got read the riot act for keeping it a secret.

“Would you try that now?”

He ducks his head, staring at the wrist in question. There’s still a little bump there, on the outside of his wristbone, and it aches sometimes… though it doesn’t bother him any more than anything else he’s done to himself since - the same, and worse. “No,” he admits.

“No,” she agrees. “Because you can’t set a bone by yourself, and this is a lot more like that than I think you want to think.”

He doesn’t say that he’s been trying _not_ to think about it like that, despite Derek’s increasingly unsubtle efforts to the contrary.

“This isn’t an order,” Melissa says. “It’s not a prescription. It’s a recommendation. But nobody’s going to make you. I think it would help you to talk about things - you have always liked to talk.” She smiles a little, with one corner of her lips, and he ducks his head, looking away, fighting his own smile despite the spark of cold behind his breastbone at the thought of what she’s suggesting.

“Hey,” she says, making him look up again. “It’s up to you.” She takes his hand, presses the square of paper into it. “Everybody on that list knows about all the stuff that goes bump in the night. Most of them know at least a little about this town, but a few of them are from further away, don’t know anything but the rumours and have no connection to Hale Pack at all. Sometimes that helps.”

“Is one of these the name you gave Derek?” he asks, staring down at the little folded square of paper as though it might do something dangerous, which the sane and stable part of him notes is totally nuts. It’s just a piece of paper. He could throw it away, burn it, tear it into pieces, if he wanted to.

“You know I can’t tell you that,” she says. _I know you already know that name,_ is what she means. Derek went out of his way to let Stiles know, when he started seeing somebody, last summer. And it’s helped him. Stiles knows it’s helped him.

He closes his hand. “I don’t know if I’m…” _Ready_ , he means to say. _Brave enough,_ is what he means, feels.

Her hand covers his. “That’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay if you’re never ready. Just… try, okay? Even if it’s just talking about it a little. Even if it’s just to Scott, or Derek. Even if you’re the only one who knows what it means.” Her hand squeezes. “It helps. Trust me.”

“I do,” he says, looking up, and putting the piece of paper in his pocket.

Maybe.

***

Hale House is empty when Stiles pulls up, except for Derek. That is, Derek is here, but not inside the house. Stiles walks through the side yard and to the back of the house where the midday sun is shining brightly down on the new garden, glinting off the sheets of plexiglass leaning up against the siding, off the sweat on Derek’s bare torso.

Stiles stops abruptly at the edge of the garden, whatever else that was in his head swept instantly aside by the sight of Derek, shirtless, wielding a mallet as he sinks the greenhouse supports into the cleared area at the far edge of the garden. The garden itself is mostly fallow, little green shoots poking up here and there, raised beds tidily separated by wooden stakes and pieces of string, but the greenhouse is taking shape, the framing for most of two walls already up.

Not that Stiles is looking at the greenhouse.

Derek must know he’s there, but he goes on working, picking up another support and placing it carefully on the right spot before picking up the mallet; a human wouldn’t be able to wield the heavy tool one-handed, but Derek taps gently to seat the metal support before taking a bigger swing to sink it more firmly into the ground and oh god, Stiles needs to go stand somewhere else, because his throat is actually dry.

He watches as Derek tests the support, wiggling it a little with one hand, before swinging the mallet up to rest against his shoulder. When he finally looks at Stiles, he’s smirking, and Stiles sputters.

“Unfair,” Stiles says, pointing accusingly. “Totally unfair. I’ve had a very difficult morning, and then you--”

“And then I…?” Derek asks, walking across the garden towards him, still smiling.

Stiles just flings out his arms to indicate Derek’s… everything. Derek’s not wearing a belt, and his pants are riding low. He looks like porn, and that’s just _mean_.

“ _Tease_ ,” Stiles says, faintly.

“Hey, it’s not my fault you just showed up. You weren’t supposed to be here until this afternoon,” Derek points out.

Stiles spots Derek’s t-shirt slung over the garden fence and snatches it up. “Dry!” he says, waving it at Derek. “You just took this off when you heard me coming! Admit it! Because you’re a cruel, cruel--”

Derek kisses him.

“Mmf,” says Stiles, dropping the t-shirt to grab at Derek’s sides, which are, oh right, bare and sweaty and… Derek twitches, because he’s ticklish, but he doesn’t pull away. Just slides his free hand around Stiles’ waist.

“Forgiven,” Stiles says against his mouth, when they separate a little.

“Yeah?” Derek asks, setting the mallet down on the ground and resting his other hand on Stiles’ hip. “Just like that?”

“You make a very compelling argument,” Stiles admits, and kisses Derek again.

When they part, this time, Stiles’ whole body is on a low hum, and Derek is watching him intently. “You know,” he says, “nobody else is home.”

And it takes Stiles a second, because this is a new thing, and he’s gotten used to reminding himself that no, that’s not what Derek meant, that they’re taking things slow…

“You-- really?” Stiles asks, his voice squeaking unattractively.

Derek shrugs, and his ears are a little pink, but his eyes are fixed firmly on Stiles’ mouth. “No promises,” he says, and Stiles nods in fervent agreement as Derek laughs, catches up his hand, and pulls him towards the back door.

***

They figured out a while ago that Derek’s a lot more comfortable when he’s in charge. Not that they’ve done much beyond kissing and touching and that really memorable two minutes a while back, but Stiles has been paying attention and he’s good at remembering details.

Derek is fine if they’re side by side, or curled up together, or sitting up. He likes Stiles in his lap, but if they’re lying down Stiles tries to stay more on the bed than on him, because he gets stiff and uncomfortable if he’s restricted. He’s a lot more comfortable if - and this has not been extensively explored since most of what they’ve done has been kissing - he can be on top.

Which is fine with Stiles, honestly. More than fine. Incredibly fine. So fine he doesn’t know how much he should say on the off-chance that it might be read as pushing. He’s been vocally encouraging of Derek’s tendency to move Stiles around as it suits him, to use his superior strength to manhandle him a little.

Stiles is _so okay_ with the manhandling, as it turns out, and as Derek, apparently impatient with their progress, hoists him up so that they can get up the stairs faster, Stiles with his legs wrapped around Derek’s waist, Stiles says so.

“Uh, so,” Stiles says, as Derek rubs a sandpapery cheeky against his throat, “I know I’ve said it before, but that - that really works for me. The muscles and the shoving and. And the. The--”

“Yeah?” Derek murmurs, mouth open and wet against his throat, nudging the bedroom door open with one foot. “I think you’ve mentioned.”

“Good,” Stiles says, breathing a little hard as Derek tumbles them down onto the bed, somehow without anybody getting a knee or an elbow anywhere painful, “good, because, because I wouldn’t want to leave important things like that unsaid.”

“That would be unlike you,” Derek agrees, pulling them both up the bed and toeing off his boots to let them thud onto the floor. Stiles already lost his shoes downstairs, so he just lets himself melt into the bed as Derek sinks down over him, elbows on either side of Stiles’ head, staring at Stiles intently.

“Are you okay?” Stiles asks urgently, because Derek is still staring at him, looking at him like he might see something that surprises him, but Derek just smiles, leans down to rub his face, again, against Stiles’ throat. Stiles knows that’s not just a wolf thing, it’s a Derek thing, and Derek hasn’t said so but Stiles thinks he likes the way Stiles’ skin pinks up like crazy when he does it.

“Right now,” Derek says, leaning back just enough to admire his handiwork, “I am very, very okay.” And then he gives a little shove with his hips, enough for Stiles to feel how hard he is.

“Oh,” says Stiles, instinctively jerking his own hips in response, “oh, good, awesome,” and then Derek is tugging at the hem of his t-shirt.

“Can I?”

“I am absolutely certain we have had the you can do whatever you want conversation before, I just want to re-iterate, for the thousandth time, that I am 100% sincere about that--” The last part of that is lost as Derek laughs and peels off Stiles’ t-shirt, throwing it off to the side somewhere before staring down at Stiles, momentarily stunned, at least until he recovers and scrapes one thumb over Stiles’ right nipple.

“Mph!” is the best way Stiles can describe the noise he makes, and he can feel the flush crawling up his neck.

Derek grins and does it again, and then with his mouth, which sorely tests Stiles’ resolution to not grab at Derek’s hair - he grabs at his shoulder, instead.

“Pants,” Stiles gasps, as Derek, apparently pleased with his results, switches his attentions to the other nipple. “Pants, unpleasant friction, pants--”

Derek makes a breathy noise and pulls back enough to let Stiles undo his own belt, and stops Stiles’ hands when he reaches to push them down, cocking an eyebrow in question.

“Oh my god yes, Derek Hale, take off my pants, come _on_ ,” Stiles says, laughing as Derek ducks his head and does just that. Stiles lifts his hips so Derek can pull pants and underwear down, slow and careful, and then Stiles kicks them all the way off, losing the socks along the way.

He’s never been entirely naked with another person, he realizes suddenly. They’ve done mostly naked, but never in a sexy context, not exactly. He’s thought maybe it wouldn’t be all that different, but it _is_ , Derek’s eyes dark and hot as he looks down at him, crawls back over Stiles’ body, radiating heat. The house can be a little chilly, but Stiles isn’t feeling it at all right now, just the intensely heightened intimacy of Derek’s skin - his own jeans are unzipped, too, but still present, his underwear showing through the gap, distended sharply by his erection. As he lowers himself down again, Stiles can feel it pressing against his belly, the way his own cock jerks in response, the way his whole body flushes hot and electric, the way he wants to wrap his arms and legs around Derek and just… writhe.

He doesn’t, though - he throttles it back, strokes a hand up Derek’s back as Derek presses his face tight to Stiles’ throat again, inhales and exhales like he’s trying to control himself. His whole body is taut, like a drawn-back bowstring, but Stiles can feel, right now, that it’s not fear or anything unpleasant, just… overwhelming.

“I want--” Derek says, and stops, and Stiles makes him meet his eyes, tries to sound calm instead of over-eager when he says:

“I know you’ve got to keep asking,” he says, “and that’s cool, but I need you to know that I’m going to keep saying yes, okay? Things I am okay with include nudity, kissing, friction of various types, general manhandling--”

Derek laughs, and kisses him again, and his mouth is hot and demanding which is… a first, really. Derek is always so careful, not exactly hesitant, but… uncertain. Like he’s not sure his desires will be welcome, no matter how many times Stiles tells him that they are. Derek _demanding_ is a fucking revelation, the way he pushes, hard, with his hips, just once, before stopping himself, exhaling raggedly against Stiles’ skin.

“Go, go,” Stiles urges him, putting his hands on Derek’s hips and tugging. He feels oddly breathless as Derek starts moving again, his whole body a sinuous line as he ruts against Stiles’ belly. He’s a little off-target, not quite putting enough pressure where Stiles needs it the most, and the zipper on his jeans scratches against Stiles’ skin with every thrust. But it almost makes it better, that Derek is taking something he _wants_ , not stopping every two seconds to check on Stiles, to make sure nothing’s wrong, that he’s just-- Derek makes a sound, a high _uh_ noise in the back of his throat, and Stiles feels one of Derek’s hands slide into his hair - not quite pulling, just gripping, and fuck, it might not matter what kind of attention his cock’s getting, Stiles is suddenly really, really close.

Stiles pulls his knees up to get a better angle and Derek’s jeans slip down a little, and Stiles can feel where Derek is leaking through his underwear, damp against Stiles’ skin. Stiles squeezes a little with his knees, and Derek’s hips stutter, and Stiles lets out an embarrassing noise of his own.

“F-fuck,” Derek says, the word stretched out and soft.

“Maybe next time,” Stiles tells him, without thinking about it at all, and has only an instant to consider regretting it when Derek’s hips jerk again and his whole body goes still and tight, Derek’s breath hard and hot in his ear.

For a long moment, the only sound is Derek breathing, coming down. His body does too, gradually relaxing, sinking down against Stiles as Stiles pushes and pulls.

“This can’t be comfortable,” Derek says eventually, words a little slurred. He’s heavier than Stiles, bigger across the torso, and it’s true, Stiles is pretty well flattened. Not that he minds.

“I’m good,” Stiles says, grabbing at Derek’s arms when he goes to move away, not-so-coincidentally sliding his whole body up against Derek’s, his cock against Derek’s bare belly. “I’m really good.” His voice squeaks a little on “good,” but he just shifts again, swallows hard. “Could be better,” he admits.

“Yeah?” Derek raises his head, looking thoughtful.

“Yeah,” Stiles says. “I mean, you don’t have to, I can-- it won’t take much--”

Derek grins for one blinding second before ducking his head down to close his mouth over Stiles’ nipple, and there are _teeth_ , and--

Derek’s face is a little awestruck as Stiles shivers through his orgasm, hands clutching at Derek’s arms. “I did say,” Stiles mumbles, coming down, “it wouldn’t take much.”

Derek kisses him, gently this time, slowly. “Was that okay?”

“That was,” Stiles says, planting a kiss right between Derek’s eyebrows, “very okay. 10 out of 10.” He wriggles a little under Derek; they’re a mess, and that’s kind of awesome.

Derek’s hand is in his hair, and he’s studying Stiles’ face like he expects to find a lie there. Of course, that’s all but impossible now. “I didn’t want you to be disappointed.”

“Hey,” Stiles says, crossing one ankle over one of Derek’s, “you could never disappoint me, okay? Plus, you know, look on the bright side: next time, wayyyy less pressure.”

Derek sighs at him, but dips his head to rub his scruffy cheek against Stiles’ again. Stiles’ hands are on Derek’s back, stroking up and down. He keeps expecting Derek to stiffen up, to pull away, but he doesn’t. Doesn’t even seem to want to.

“We should shower or something,” Stiles says at last.

“Probably,” Derek agrees, face hidden against Stiles’ neck again. “In a while?”

It takes Stiles a minute to get it, the way Derek is breathing against him, slow and deep and deliberate, and then he laughs. “You like that, huh? That you got me all messy?”

Derek presses his face in tighter, and Stiles feels a tiny flare of embarrassment from him, but it’s mostly subsumed under warm contentment. “You smell really good,” Derek admits, his voice small.

“Yeah I do,” Stiles says, hooking one arm around the back of Derek’s neck and relaxing back into the bed. This, unsurprisingly, totally works for him too.

“You cold?” Derek asks, a few minutes later. He sounds sleepy.

“I’m amazing,” Stiles tells him, and it’s nothing but the truth.

***

They fall asleep, obviously, and when Stiles wakes up it’s because Derek is sitting up, face turned towards the door.

“They back?” Stiles asks, yawning. It’s still light out, judging by what he can see out the window, though only barely.

“Not everybody,” Derek says, “but yeah.” Which probably means more than three or four of the pack. If it were fewer, Derek would name them.

“Guess we should get up, huh,” Stiles asks, and Derek turns back to him, face unreadable for a second or two before he smiles, and Derek Hale is blushing, wow. Stiles raises a hand to cup his cheek, utterly charmed.

“Probably,” agrees Derek, covering Stiles’ hand with his own for a brief moment before sliding away, off the bed, heading for the bathroom. He glances over his shoulder with a sly look, and then pushes his jeans and his underwear all the way down and off, stepping out of them as he disappears around the bathroom door. Stiles barely gets a glimpse, but _damn_ . He is _outraged_. Stiles pushes up on one elbow as the shower turns on.

“Mean!” he yells, and Derek’s laughter is the only answer he gets.

***

So this is an eventuality he never considered to its fullest extent.

Well. Not entirely true. He’s been very aware, for some time now, that it’s impossible to hide things - particularly _intimate_ things - from werewolves.

He had not gone so far as to imagine the way Erica’s chin comes up, her nostrils flaring a little as she sniffs, before her head whips around and she stares at Stiles with a huge grin and delight written all over her face.

“You--!”

“Shh!” Stiles says urgently, even as Erica vaults over the back of the couch, bounds across the living room, and hugs him so hard his feet come off the floor.

“Oh, calm down, he’s still upstairs,” Erica says, setting him down again, but she looks no less gleeful. She pulls away, hands on his shoulders. “Congratulations, Batman,” she says, and kisses him on the cheek.

“Don’t bug him about it, okay?” Stiles says, rubbing at where he’s sure there’s a bright red lipstick print.

“We wouldn’t,” says Erica, but it’s fond instead of exasperated. She ruffles his hair before can duck away, and then slips past him, heading for the kitchen.

They don’t, either. Dinner is an informal affair, half the pack elsewhere, Erica and Boyd and Allison and Scott sort of drifted in over a half-hour. The wolves keep their exclamations to themselves, but they keep exchanging glances whenever Derek’s not looking; they don’t seem to care if Stiles is looking. Someone’s clued Allison in, too, judging by the way she keeps dimpling at Stiles across the table. Probably Scott, who’s always so careful about keeping her in the loop on information she can’t get the way the wolves can. Stiles used to think it was funny, given that she didn’t seem to mind either way, at least until it was about him.

Stiles would be a lot more annoyed about the whole thing, except… they’re all so _happy_. For him, for Derek. Just happy. And Stiles can feel it. It’s distracting. Makes it way too hard to work up any indignation or really do anything except cross his arms and try to avoid anybody’s eyes.

Derek’s happy, too. He feels that strongest of all. And he must know what’s going on around them, but he doesn’t seem bothered. Maybe it’s some kind of no-privacy werewolf-social-norms thing, but that doesn’t make it fair.

Stiles stares down at his plate, and devotes a few seconds to forming the dirtiest mental picture he can possibly manage, before pushing it at Derek. Their bond isn’t quite pictures or words, but the essence of it seems to penetrate. Derek doesn’t look at him, but his ears turn slowly red.

Vindicated, Stiles returns his focus to his dessert plate.


	4. The River

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _He doesn’t stop feeling guilty._
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> _He definitely doesn't stop dreaming._

 

He doesn’t stop feeling guilty.

He knows it, now, knows that it’s guilt and does know, intellectually, that it’s stupid. _Irrational_ , he reminds himself daily, picturing Derek’s disapproving face. But it’s also not easy, breaking the patterns of a lifetime. He sees Melissa at pack meals, talks to her on the phone sometimes, but he still has to go away sometimes because he just… he can’t handle it, being around it. He never stops feeling guilty about it, never stops being dragged into connections with other memories, even though everybody else tells him over and over that it’s fine, they understand. Sometimes they literally can’t help understanding, because they’re all closer, these days, than ever. Not always, but at moments of great intensity, well. It’s just one more thing to feel guilty about.

Most of a year later, he hasn’t called any of the numbers, either. But he does think that some time soon, he will, which is maybe the strangest part of all.

He definitely doesn’t stop dreaming.

The dreams get less unsettling, and they get a little less intense over time. Not so much that he has more control as that whatever was fueling their power and control over _him_ is at a low ebb. He hasn’t had a hallucination for a couple of months - not since the day last year he went to see Melissa - which is a good thing because it’s a long drive home on his own, and the look on Dad’s face, on Derek’s when it came to light that he’d been driving while under the influence of _hallucinations, for fuck’s sake, Stiles_ , there was a bit of a fight. A one-sided fight, with Dad and Derek taking turns not-yelling at him and Stiles just nodding shamefacedly.

This time, when he crosses the border of the town, Derek is waiting for him.

It takes him a minute to realize it, because their bond is close enough these days that the distance between Berkeley and Beacon Hills doesn’t feel like much. Stiles looks up and down the road as he pulls over, but it’s empty except for them: Stiles and the Jeep and the big black wolf walking out onto the gravel shoulder and putting his huge paws up on the window until Stiles rolls it down, mouth open and tongue lolling and breath fogging the air.

“Well, come on,” Stiles says, and Derek jumps in through the window and into the Jeep, settling in the footwell with his chin on the dashboard. He’s too big to sit comfortably on the seat. Stiles is still surprised, sometimes, by just _how_ big. Derek finally mastered the full shift at midsummer, just him and Stiles alone under the full moon, and he’s taken every opportunity since to run in the woods on four paws instead of two legs.

“Feet on the mat, I just vacuumed the carpets,” Stiles says, and Derek gives him a sideways look before pointedly pulling his back left paw onto the floormat. He sighs, fogging the windshield, and Stiles rolls his eyes before pulling back onto the road.

He drives straight through the town and back into the woods, and though he’s been able to feel it since he passed through the wards, the sense of welcome increases sharply as the trees rise up around them. It’s grown steadily stronger over the past few months, as they grew closer to the time laid out in the book Aunt Pearl found and closer together as a pack. Things have been easier, getting easier every day, and that’s seemed to empower the whatever-it-is out there in the woods. The nemeton. Grandmother Tree. Aunt Pearl goes on calling it a well. The words, so far as Stiles can feel, don’t really matter. Only that they’re aware of it, even though none of them have yet laid eyes upon it.

Tonight is the full moon, and that’s about to change.

Today Hale House is not empty, but it’s not full to bursting. Isaac is home, and Lydia is upstairs, sleeping off a red-eye flight, and Allison is in the kitchen, probably only making coffee since she’s been banned from cooking since last Christmas. Nearly everyone is in town, though, within the bounds of the wards, and the last of them will be there long before nightfall.

“How are you feeling?” Derek asks, coming out of the mudroom beyond the kitchen, tying the drawstring on a pair of sweatpants he keeps back there for when he comes in fully shifted.

“I’m okay,” he says, reaching for the nearly-full coffee pot, but Allison bats his hand away.

“You told Lydia you weren’t going to sleep before you drove in,” she says, and when Stiles makes a noise of complaint and tries to duck around her she neatly hip-checks him away from the counter. “And _Pearl_ said this might take a lot out of you.”

“Aww, we don’t _know_ that for sure,” Stiles says, giving up on the coffee pot and staring longingly at Allison’s mug instead. She smiles at him and takes a sip, not offering to share.

“You’re tired,” Derek says, coming up behind him and rubbing a cheek against the top of his head. “And everybody remembers the time you fell off the porch just warding the house.”

“I only _almost_ fell off the porch,” Stiles protests, as Allison giggles. That was more than a year ago, summer before last, the first time he tried keying a ward spell to the pack. It’s possible that the energy necessary to the spell was what almost sent him head-first over the railing, but it could also have been the minor blood loss. And he also remembers that despite all that, Derek still made him run through the woods for a million years before sending him home to rest.

 _Year before last._ It feels like so much more time has passed.

It might not be a problem for much longer, at any rate. If all goes well tonight, if they bring the tree back into the world with them… he’s read a lot about nemetons over the past several months. He’s not sure how he feels about the prospect of “immeasurable power,” but he’s pretty sure his pack will keep him from going full-on supervillain. Anyway he’s suffered enough magical overloads in the past year to never want to risk it again.

“C’mon,” Derek says, turning Stiles around and giving him a gentle push into the living room.

“You’ve got everything you need?” Derek asks as he nudges him towards the couch. It’s only sort of a question. They’ve gone over everything so many times, even though the clearest direction the spell in the old book gave was _intent_. Stiles would be more annoyed by that if he wasn’t so used to it. So much of magic is about intent. The details change, the trappings vary, but the meaning remains.

“Eh,” Stiles says, wobbling a hand in the air. “Ready as I’m gonna be.” He blinks at the mug Derek sets down on the coffee table in front of him, steaming vigorously and with the tag and string of a teabag looped around the handle. He didn’t even see anybody make that, let alone notice Derek bring it out of the kitchen with them.

Derek sits down next to him. “Then how about you relax,” he suggests, nudging Stiles with one shoulder until he reaches for the mug of tea. It’s too hot to drink right away, but just having a hot drink in his hands with the memory of the chill outside, the white layer of frost covering everything, is comforting. Soporific, really, by the time he gets to the bottom of the mug. He holds it cupped in his hands, though, because it’s warm. Derek is a steady presence at his side, and if he listens, he can hear snowflakes hissing against the windows, the roof of the porch. The first snow, and the sun is just going down, the twilight of the year’s longest night.

He falls asleep like that, head on Derek’s shoulder, the house warm and safe around him.

***

_It’s sunset, or nearly, and he doesn’t remember this. He’s not a child, and he’s not another him - maybe, he thinks, this is a real dream, something conjured out of his imagination. It’s not like he’s never dreamt of Mom, though those were always unsettling dreams, before - her voice silenced by the spell, the quality of the dream surreal._

_This is strangely ordinary, with Mom walking just a little ways ahead of him, and the rest of the pack further ahead of them both, out of sight but audible. The voices he hears are his own pack - Scott and Erica and Boyd and Isaac and Derek and the others - as well as parts of packs he remembers from his might-have-beens. He can make out Laura’s voice, Graham’s, Natalie’s high sweet laugh, Talia’s low, resounding one. It feels like a bell-toll, humming in his bones._

_The sound of Talia’s voice makes Mom lift her head, look back over her shoulder, reaching out a hand._

_“Come here, Baby,” she says, and it’s familiar for a thousand reasons as he jogs a few steps up the rise they’re climbing to grab her hand. Mom squeezes his fingers, swings their joined hands. “Yeah,” she says, softly. “That’s it. You feel it?”_

_“Yeah.” It’s not far now - ahead of them, still too far away to see, but he can see where the trees lean in close, the shadows under the canopy thickening like smoke._

_“It’s almost time,” says Mom, and he looks at her, and she’s smiling. “You’re ready.”_

_It’s in him to object, for a second, but he just shakes his head. “I wish you’d told me,” he says instead, and instantly feels guilty. He doesn’t blame her. It wasn’t her fault. But he still wishes… he wishes for a lot of things that he wouldn’t dare speak aloud. Even now, the limits of his power are hard to see, not quite tangible. He worries about tipping over into memory again, unable to find the surface. He worries more about what change he might be able to work in the real world, if he isn’t careful._

_“I know you do,” she says, and squeezes his hand again. “It’s okay to wish it, Baby. It isn’t only wanting things that makes it so.”_

_“It’s easy to feel like I could, sometimes,” he says, eyes fixed on the darkness ahead._

_“You always were a worrier,” Mom says, voice fond. “But you’re strong, too. Stronger than you should have had to be. Stronger than me.” She sounds sad, now, and he stops, looks at her. She reaches out, touches his face, looks back._

_“Are you happy, Baby?”_

_And it jolts him, because it’s not like a dream at all, because Mom’s looking at him with this strangely_ present _quality in her eyes, like she’s really here, really holding his chin with her fingertips, really watching his face like she’ll know if what he says is the truth._

_But then, she always did._

_“Yeah,” he says, throat thick with tears - regret and loss and all the might-have-beens they might have had. “I just - I wish you could have been here.”_

_And she pinches, quirks a little smile, kisses his forehead. “Haven’t you worked it out yet, Baby?” she says, and hugs him close, lips close to his ear like she’s whispering a secret. “Just because someone’s not around doesn’t mean they’re gone.”_

***

For the first time in a long time, when he wakes up, his eyes are dry, his chest full of warmth rather than hollow.

He’s not alone, though it’s not Derek sitting next to him anymore, but Aunt Pearl. It takes him a minute to realize it, the familiar herbs-and-smoke smell and the different configuration of soft and hard; Aunt Pearl’s shoulder is bonier than Derek’s, but not much lower... and scratchier. He opens his eyes, and the world resolves: she’s wearing a heavy cable-knit sweater and reading a book propped up on one knee.

“You back with us, kid?” she asks, her voice uncharacteristically soft, like she’s distracted, but he can see that her right hand, the one not holding the book, is flat on her thigh, fingertips rubbing against the fabric of her slacks. He wonders, for a moment, how much she saw - her sleeves are pushed up, and they’re touching from elbow to wrist, and while it usually takes skin-to-skin with everyone but Derek, the same might not hold true for someone as powerful as Aunt Pearl even if they weren’t touching. When he moves to pull away, though, she grabs his wrist, fingers calloused and gentle.

“It’s okay, smart boy,” she says, voice still low and soft and strange, and he knows, now, that it wasn’t distraction. “All’s well.” She sucks in a breath that makes her shoulders rise, and he sits up, wordlessly offering her a tissue from the box on the coffee table in front of them. He doesn’t look until she’s balled it up and tossed it easily into the wastebasket in the corner, on the other side of the room. When he does, she’s smiling, the smile a little crooked. The hand on his wrist tightens a little, loosens as he meets her eyes.

“You’re doing good, kiddo,” she says, her voice a little closer to normal. “You’re going to be fine.”

“If you say so,” Stiles says rather than arguing, though he knows she means more than just tonight’s ceremony. Stiles slumps back into the couch as she releases his wrist, pats him briskly on the knee and snaps her book shut.

The house is buzzing with people, though they’re all at least a room away or upstairs. He can hear Dad’s voice in the kitchen, laughing at something (the shutter between the rooms is pulled down), hear the low murmur of Boyd and Erica at the top of the stairs. Derek is outside, probably in the garden, his presence a clear, strong draw, but more like a magnetic pole these days than a riptide. Just something he can always find, always use to orient himself.

The kitchen door swings open then, spilling out a good many more people than it seems like the room should be able to hold. Dad is there, and Isaac, and Allison and Scott. Lydia trails the others, already dressed in going-to-fight-monsters clothes, which in Lydia’s case is jeans, an insulated purple hoodie, and a pair of hiking shoes. The others are similarly attired, shoes on and dressed for the cold except for coats. They’ve apparently been waiting on Stiles.

“There’s only about an hour until perigee,” Lydia informs the group, glancing up from her phone and not tapping her foot impatiently, but giving the impression of doing so nonetheless. Stiles doesn’t point out, _again_ , that they don’t know for sure that performing the ceremony at the moment of least distance between the Earth and the moon is all that important, but he agreed with her that while treading uncertain ground they might as well take as few chances as possible. He just rolls his head against the back of the couch, taking stock of himself and deciding that yeah, what he said to Derek earlier was true: he’s as ready as he’s going to get. He looks up, sees Aunt Pearl standing over him, eyebrow raised, and accepts the hand she’s holding out, lets her pull him to his feet.

He does one last check, though there’s not much to carry. Water and a few thermoses of coffee, just out of habit; these are their woods, and they’re not going that far, at least by wolf standards. It’s the work of a moment to pull on his coat and check the charge on his phone, though once they get closer he knows it won’t be much use. Powerful magic tends to mess with reception.

He beats the others outside because Melissa’s car pulls up, judging by the chorus of greetings coming from the front of the house. Out back, Derek is standing in the garden, hands in the pockets of his coat, staring up at the sky. It’s a gorgeous, clear night, the snow tapered off for now, the clouds gone. Above them is only a dark, star-pricked infinity, the full moon bright and close. Not quite an hour until perigee. He can’t feel the moon the way the wolves can, and he never will, but he can still feel the weight of it, the tidal push and pull, as though his body, as well as his mind, is temporarily aware that the moon is a massive, genuine thing and not only a bright distant shape.

“What does it feel like?” he asks, as Derek reaches out to take his hand, bare fingers slotting in between Stiles’ gloved ones. His hands are shockingly warm despite the chill in the air.

“You know what it feels like,” Derek says, amused. “Or nearly.”

“It’s not the same,” Stiles says.

Derek makes an agreeable noise, and then a thoughtful one. “It’s like I’m the moonlight,” he says, at length, and there is a flash of sadness from him, there-and-then-gone. “That’s what Grandma Rose used to say. Like we came from up there, and when the moon is out, we’re… connected, again.”

Stiles stares at him until he grimaces and looks away. “It sounds stupid,” he says. “Kid stuff. Bedtime stories.”

“No,” Stiles says quickly, squeezing Derek’s hand. “No, I… I know what you mean.” Because more and more, he feels that about these woods, about the very ground under his feet. More acutely, since the tree started to wake up, to reach for him. Like he’s anchored, where he belongs. Like he’s only an extension of this place - this place that had as much hand in the making of him as it has every Hale ever born in their territory.

Like he’s the earth and Derek is the sky. He doesn’t say that aloud, but the thought settles on him, and it’s strangely right-feeling; words put to something that’s been true all along. Maybe exactly the kind of balance their ancestors intended, when they first formed the bond between their families, long ago.

The others join them pretty quickly, conversation reaching them as they circle the house, step out of the garden without much consultation. They all know they’re following Stiles, but it’s a lot more like a stroll than a ritual. He can hear the others talking around them, voices low but not hushed, not careful, Jackson and Danny shoving playfully at each other. This, too, feels right. Togetherness, if the words on the page in that old book are right, is the whole point.

It’s not quite like what he remembers; there’s a little more solemnity to the night than he recalls from his might-have-beens, but then those were moments from a world where stability was never lost, never had to be rebuilt, piece by piece. A world without the slow-knitting wound that characterizes this one. That other him was never afraid that he might not be equal to this. That other him had Mom, holding his hand, guiding him long before it was his time, his responsibility.

For all that, though he’s nervous, he isn’t afraid. His pack is with him, his family is here, and Derek’s hand is wrapped tight around his own.

It seems like a long walk, but then the other times he’s made the trek he’s been asleep, or not paying attention. This time he’s fully cognizant, and he can feel the gradual change around them, the way the trees seem closer, bigger, older; the way the path grows narrower and more shadowed, even though the moon is bright and huge above them, falling in bright, watery dapples on the ground, shining off the light dusting of snow that has penetrated the canopy. Soon enough they’re close enough that Stiles starts to feel a clear direction, and he orients them towards it without really thinking. Around them there is a sense of heightened awareness, though he wonders for a moment if it’s only him that feels it - a glance at Aunt Pearl finds her looking around, shoulders up. Not just him, then.

“Is this it?” Danny asks eventually, and Stiles looks over to see him standing next to a big tree, his hand on the trunk. Stiles draws closer and sees what Danny’s found: Mom’s mark, standing out starkly against the bark.

“We’re close,” Stiles agrees, looking around. Over there is the log Aunt Pearl guided them to, months ago. Ahead of them, the trees lean in close. “We’re almost there.”

He’s never been awake for this part, never been present or fully aware, and even though he’s all of those things right now, he knows he’ll be hazy, later, on the details of how they went from walking slow and sure through ever-darkening shadow under low and interwoven branches to stepping through, to standing, blinking, in moonlight so bright it’s nearly blinding.

The clearing is a near-perfect circle, and despite the cold the ground is covered in smooth, springy green grass dotted here and there with moss and clover. It’s warmer, too, enough that Stiles immediately unzips his jacket, sees many of the others doing the same.

In the middle of it all is the most unlikely part: the tree itself.

It’s not as he remembered it, not as he dreamed it. In those visions the tree was massive in both aspect and physicality, and while it’s certainly massive, the power of it, the sheer overwhelming pulse of it, is muted, like it’s diffused beneath them and around them rather than a focused point; sparks of rainbow scattered about a room rather than a burning glow, the spark ready to light a flame if he just lets it.

It’s unquestionably aware of him, though, in a way that he hadn’t realized was muted until he stood before its source. He sways a little on his feet, and out of the corner of his eye he sees Aunt Pearl clutch at her chest, as though she’s overwhelmed, though her face doesn’t show it much. Even Dad lets out a low whistle, and Derek, next to him, lets out a long, shaky breath, eyes turned upwards.

Visible through the bare branches of the tree, the full moon seems to fill the whole world.

“Two minutes,” Lydia says, voice low, and Stiles shoots her a tiny grin before turning back to the tree. She must have been counting, her internal clock precise down to the second; he knows without looking that his own phone wouldn’t give him much sense just now. The air itself feels like it’s vibrating, a low hum that shivers across his skin and inside his bones.

“You ready?” Scott asks from a few paces behind them, and Stiles startles himself with a laugh, glancing back at Scott, who’s smiling at him, bouncing on his toes.

“Not even close,” Stiles says, and turns back to the tree, pulling Derek with him.

In his memories, his not-quite-memories, Mom’s hands move with assurance, silver knife flashing in the moonlight with practiced ease. He pulls off his gloves and takes out the knife, which is warm from being carried inside his coat. It’s the same knife, Mom’s knife, and that grounds him as he looks at Derek, who’s watching him steadily, eyes dark, one hand extended for Stiles to take.

This, he’s done before, and he does it again with confidence: one quick nick at the fleshy heel of his hand, a quick stroke across Derek’s palm, because he’ll heal quickly. And then in one motion, caught up in the motions like a dance, the last step forward to within touching distance, bringing their hands up together to press against the bark of the tree.

This isn’t like he remembers, either; it’s slow and gradual, like a spring bubbling up; a little at first, and gradually, more, gaining volume and velocity. He remembers it as a pause and a rush, but this is careful, as though the magic itself is taking its time, afraid of overwhelming them. It gets overwhelming pretty quickly all the same, the power and the dark and the light all caught up together and reaching up, out, and for a long moment he feels as though it’s him, too, reaching for a hand stretching out from the other side of a sharp divide, like he won’t quite make it, can’t quite reach, won’t be enough--

\--it’s enough. It’s too much. It’s everything, the not-there specks of light rushing up and out from where his and Derek’s hands spread against the trunk, the _skin_ of the tree. He feels too-small and too-big and uncannily like a hand is closed, gently, around his heart, which is beating fit to shake the ground, like he’ll fly apart into a million pieces and never come together again, and the strangest part is how much that _doesn’t_ scare him. He feels ancient, and impossibly wise, and impossibly young, all at the same time, and if he lives to be a hundred years old he thinks he’ll never be able to explain this feeling to anyone else.

Gradually, it ebbs, and he’s only himself again. As he becomes aware of his body again, of his surroundings, he realizes he feels almost too-warm, the back of his neck damp with sweat, even though the clearing, despite its unseasonably temperate microclimate, is still far from actually being _warm_. His hand is cramping, where it’s still pressed against the tree next to Derek’s. Derek is breathing with extraordinary care, not quite panting, but harder than he normally would; audibly.

Stiles pulls his hand away slowly, carefully, sees Derek do the same, and when Derek looks at him, his eyes are aglow, his face half-shifted, his expression one of awe; tear-tracks are visible on his face, and Stiles reaches up to swipe them away with the sleeves of the fleece he’s wearing under his coat, a grin suddenly pulling at his face without his direction. Derek laughs, high and giddy, and pushes his face into Stiles’s hands, a second later pulling Stiles close to shove his face into Stiles’ hair. Stiles laughs too, until Derek pulls back, looks around at the others. Aunt Pearl is wide-eyed and open-mouthed, one hand pressed flat to her chest. The wolves are all smiling and even Dad and Melissa look dumb-struck, a little high. Everyone, even Lydia, even _Jackson_ , has tears on their face, but they’re all happy, amazed, _safe_.

Safer than they’ve ever been, because Stiles can still feel it: the way the tree is sunk deep into the magic of the territory, roots stretching out for miles and miles, awareness encompassing the town and the Preserve and beyond. He doesn’t push too far, doesn’t want to be bowled under, but it’s so much easier now, with the grandmother tree readily offering up its reserves to his use. To _their_ use, for their protection; the rightful inheritors of this impossible heirloom.

“I don’t know how I feel,” says Derek, though he’s still smiling a little, eyes flicking up, every few moments, to the bright moon. “I think maybe it’s… grateful.”

“Hold still,” says Melissa, suddenly at Stiles’ shoulder, grabbing Stiles’ right hand and placing it, palm-up, in Derek’s. They both stare bemusedly until Lydia, coming up at her side, pulls out a pack of antiseptic wipes and hands them over. Melissa rips open the package and swipes the wipe across the heel of Stiles’ palm, where blood is still sluggishly welling.

“Don’t let me interrupt you,” she says, with a wry smile. “I’m just making sure you don’t die of sepsis.”

That startles another laugh out of Stiles, and he holds still, watches as Melissa tapes gauze over the cut, wraps some gauze over it a few times, and shoves his gloves against his chest. He can feel the warmth of her affection for them both, the amusement at the look on Derek’s face, the way he’s still grinning like a kid even with his face half-shifted and his eyes Alpha-red. He can always sense Melissa a little these days, but it’s a lot stronger right now, and he wonders if that’s because of the spell, or if it’s just their proximity to the tree, acting as a conduit.

 _Well, of course,_ comes the thought immediately, like it’s obvious. _That was the whole point_.

It takes a second for him to realize it, that the thought didn’t exactly come from him, and then he jumps, hand jerking out of Derek’s, as he spins to stare up at the tree.

“It remembers,” he whispers, before he can think about it.

“What?” Derek’s close, his breath warm against the side of his face. Behind them, the pack is a bright scattering of known quantities, alight with laughter and excitement, invigorated. Renewed, less like a handshake or a contract and more like a green bud bursting free of the earth. It’s heady, especially for Stiles, who still feels a little unsteady.

“It -” Stiles considers, and then shakes his head. Maybe Derek would get it; maybe Derek, who’s as closely tied into the heart of this particular magic as Stiles is, would understand better than anyone else. But Stiles isn’t very sure about it himself, not yet. Not nearly sure enough to put it into words. “It’s okay,” he says instead, taking Derek’s hand again with his unbandaged one. And Derek hesitates, but then he relaxes, like he knows Stiles knows what he’s doing. Or he will.

He doesn’t understand everything. He knows, these days, that even small magics do more than even the most skilled and powerful worker can fully comprehend, just because even workers are human, and human beings have limits.

But he does understand the purpose from their own perspective, or thinks he does. The nemeton  - the grandmother tree, the locus of power that feels like a great heart beating beneath their feet - is above all else a _continuity_ , a living memory of everyone who has ever lived under its protection, a waiting palimpsest for everyone who ever will. _We don’t live forever,_ he remembers Aunt Pearl saying, _but we go on._

Stiles raises his hand, the bandaged one, to the tree again. He’s braced for a surge this time, but it doesn’t come; it’s more like easing into the current of deep water, and it pulls at him, but gently, the flow strong but constant, an ever-branching river rather than the rocky, narrow roads he once pictured, their possibilities unspooling away through a dark wood.

In his mind it’s an unbroken line reaching back and back and back, beyond where even he can see; blood and choice and family, past and present and future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don’t know if there’s more of this story. I have toyed briefly with the idea of writing the story of The Time Stiles Was Kidnapped By Rogue Hunters, but so far no actual plot has suggested itself to me. It might happen, but this feels like a good place to stop for now. Nothing’s perfect, but everyone is figuring things out, and at least on an emotional level, I think pretty much everybody’s going to be okay.
> 
> You guys have been great, and I’m so glad you were all here to play in this little AU with me, aka: How I Wish Teen Wolf Would Be Written Because Frankly It’s Pretty Terrible. Who knows? In some other world, there might have been a time when this was how the canon went: a crazy otherworld where people talked about their feelings, talked about their plans, and adults acted like fucking adults.
> 
> Crazy, I know.

**Author's Note:**

> **WARNINGS**
> 
>  
> 
> This story contains: references to past sexual abuse, statutory rape, and other types of intimate assault and nonconsensual acts involving a minor; some (at least one or two pretty graphic) depiction(s) of and references to panic attacks and other anxiety disorder symptoms, some of which escalate throughout the course of the story; a situation that might be interpreted as, at best, magical dubcon, though nothing is graphic and the actual assault is mostly metaphorically related to sex (specifically: non-consensual, non-fatal feeding by an incubus); the fallout of recovering repressed memories; hallucinations relating directly to past trauma from various kinds of assault, or at least experiences that could be seen that way. 
> 
> Also, it’s really hard to categorize this particular warning, but this story contains the following: references to the death of a parent from cancer, as well as the implication of reliving said experiences with another person, and PTSD-like reactions to this information being divulged. Having a family member die of a prolonged terminal illness, particularly cancer, is a known vector for the disorder, and boy does Stiles ever have it.


End file.
